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PRESENTED 1SY 






REGENERATION 



BY 



J^ 



EDMUND m SEARS, 



'« The existing state of Christianity amongst those who profess it does not war- 
rant the objection, that all further advance in the development of the perception 
we possess of its nature and application is impracticable or unnecessary. If we 
have the perfect conception of Christianity, we are making a lamentably imperfect 
application of it ; for the world, alas ! is to a very small extent under its power ; 
if we have not the perfect conception of it, then every attempt to regard it from a 
more lofty moral point of view should be welcomed as a real and earnest attempt 
for the highest welfare of mankind." — Morell. 



SIXTH EDITION. 



BOSTON: 
WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 

PUBLISHERS FOR THE 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION, 

21 BROMFIELD ST. 

1859. 



33 77 f 6 

■St 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by 

The American Unitarian Association, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 






University Press, CAMr.RiDfiE : 
Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company. 



NOTE 



The following Treatise was written at the request 
of the Executive Committee of the American Uni- 
tarian Association, who earnestly commend it to 
public attention. As individuals, they may not 
concur in every opinion advanced, nor adopt every 
verbal expression employed by the writer, but they 
unanimously and cordially approve of the great 
thoughts and principles that form the basis of the 
work, and of the spirit and temper in which it is 
written. They publish it because they believe that 
the clearness and strength with which it states and 
enforces the great practical doctrines of Chris- 
tianity, and the beauty and power with which it 
portrays and recommends the profoundest religious 
experience, will secure and reward a thorough 
study. 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction 



PART I. 

THE NATURAL MAN. 

Chap. I. Theories 

II. Hereditary Corruption 

III. Acquired Instincts . 

IV. Testimony of Consciousness 
V. Childhood 

VI. The Mystery of Death 
VII. The « Adam " of St. Paul 
VIII. The Law of Descent Beneficent 

PART II. 

THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 



Chap. I. The Holy Spirit .... 

n. Its General and Special Influence 

HI. Spiritual Influence 

IV. The Primal Innocence 

V. Light in Darkness .... 

VI. Distinctions . 



VH. 



13 

18 
29 
36 
40 
46 
52 
59 



67 
. 73 

81 

. 89 

99 

. 104 
Total Depravity 110 



1* 



Q CONTENTS. 

PART III. 

THE NEW MAN. 

. 121 
Chap. I. Regeneration 

lOD 

H. Choice 

III. The Books opened 

IV. The Books opened . • 

1 61 
V. The Books opened 

VI. Another Book opened . 

VII. Conflict and Victory 

VIII. The Mediator 2Qg 

IX. Gethsemane ... 

214 
X. The Atonement 

XI. New Heavens and a New Earth 
XII. Retrospect and Prospect 

. 244 
XILI. Vistas 



INTRODUCTION 



No higher question can be offered to the human 
intellect, than that of the method of salvation by- 
Jesus Christ. Its unmeasured importance is obvi- 
ous to us, whenever in contemplative mood we open 
the pages of the New Testament, and find that a 
splendid apparatus of means has been provided ; 
for we know that this would not have been done 
unless momentous interests were at issue. These 
two questions, What are we ? and Whither do we 
tend? will at times press painfully upon thoughtful 
minds, and demand an answer. Ideals of a bettei 
state are haunting them, and producing within them 
unutterable longings after peace. 

There are three topics which cannot fail to com- 
mand the interest and attention of those whose 
minds are revolving the great problem of life : — 

The evil, depravity, and suffering involved in the 
human condition; the darkness that broods upon 
the earth and upon our own spirits. 

Conceptions of a better state; dreams of perfec- 



o INTRODUCTION. 

tion, visions that come in shapes of unearthly beau- 
ty, floating out of a purer ether, and giving us 
gleams of a better world. 

The way that lies out of one condition into the 
other, out of the darkness into the light, out of 
storms to the haven of Happier Isles ; in short, the 
method of salvation. 

These are the topics which . we now approach, 
and we do it in the persuasion that they underlie all 
our business and all our theologies, and that, though 
they have occupied so much of human thought, yet 
they never pressed more urgently upon the common 
mind than now. The old theologies do not satisfy. 
They do not answer these questions. They do not 
so much give light, as hang in the way of it. And 
yet, because they are gradually changing and soft- 
ening like convolving clouds, and reflecting new, 
though ever-varying hues, they show that the light 
is coming, and that they are finally to break away. 
Meanwhile let us use the light already shining, and 
that will be a preparation for more. 

The theme we have in hand will lead us to dis- 
cuss the following topics : the state of man by 
nature, his spiritual capacities, his regeneration 
and the means of it. If any of our reasonings 
should seem to lie remote from our beaten paths of 
inquiry, or if they should not sound like the tradi- 
tional utterances of denomination, we would beg 
the reader to consider whether they may not be just 
as worthy of his attention. All sects are liable to 



INTRODUCTION. U 

fall into provincialisms of thought ; to sink the lan- 
guage of the universal Reason into a corrupted dia- 
lect ; and so it is better, if possible, on such themes 
as these to rise above sect and take our stand out- 
side of it, haply if we may stand on those sublimer 
heights, where we may catch the clearer responses 
of the Divine word. In the following pages, there- 
fore, we propose to leave behind the old controversies, 
except so far as to be intelligible, and so far as is 
necessary to show the truth in bolder outline by 
its juxtaposition with error. 

Impressed with the solemn magnitude of these 
themes, we approach them in reverent and listening 
mood, 



PART I. 



THE NATURAL MAN 



THE ANCIENT DESOLATIONS; THE RUINS OF MANY GENERATIONS. 

Isaiah lviii. 12. 



" These are ruins indeed ; but they proclaim that something noble 
hath fallen into ruin, — proclaim it by signs mournful yet venerable, 
like the desolations of an ancient temple, — like the broken walls and 
falling columns and hollow sounds of decay that sink down heavily 
among its deserted recesses." — Dewey. 



CHAPTER I. 

THEORIES. 

" If our native propensities are themselves a sin, then the conclusion seems to be 
plain and inevitable, that God is the author of sin ; not merely that he has made 
beings who can commit sin, but that he has made beings a part of whose very na- 
ture, as it comes from his hands, is sin I am unwilling to plunge into the 

yawning gulf which is laid open by such a process of thought." — Professor 
Stuart. 

The actual state of man by birth and by nature 
is a question still involved in the controversies of 
the schools. To turn aside to these would divert us 
from our main object ; and fortunately this subject 
can be taken out of the province of polemics, and 
brought to the test of sober fact and reality. We 
will only allude, then, to the theories of the sects, so 
far forth as to give precision and completeness to the 
argument. With some variety of statement and con- 
fusion of coloring^ where different creeds shade off 
into each other, we shall find in the main that the 
prevailing theologies on this topic fall asunder into 
three forms. 

The first form is this, — that man comes into be- 
ing burdened with hereditary guilt, inclined to all 
evil by the original bend of his faculties, and capa- 
ble of no good until God by a sovereign act creates 
him anew. But iest we should misrepresent this 



14 THE NATURAL MAN. 

form of belief, we prefer to state it in its own lan- 
guage, which lacks nothing in strength and clearness. 
The Westminster divines say : — 

" The covenant being made with Adam, not only 
for himself, but for his posterity, all mankind de- 
scending from him by ordinary generation sinned in 
him and fell with him in his first transgression. 

" The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell 
consists in the guilt of Adam's first sin, the want of 
original righteousness, and the corruption of his 
whole nature, which is commonly called original 
sin, together with all actual transgressions which 
proceed from it." 

Another standard of faith states the doctrine 
thus : — 

" By this sin they [the first parents] and we in 
them fell from original righteousness and communion 
with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly de- 
filed in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. 

" They being the root and by God's appointment 
standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the 
guilt of their sin is imputed, and corrupted nature con- 
veyed to all their posterity descending from them by 
ordinary generation. 

" Every sin, both original and actual, being a trans- 
gression of the righteous law of God, and contrary 
thereunto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the 
sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God 
and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, 
with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal." * 

* Ratio Discipline. Confession of Faith, Chap. VI. 



THEORIES. 15 

We confess to a shudder of the nerves when copy- 
ing these words, which we do chiefly to make our 
statement exhaustive. We are apt to confound truth 
with error under the fog of indefinite language. It is 
a great deal better to lay them side by side, stripped 
of all the fine gauze which a more modern fastid- 
iousness would weave around them, that each may 
be seen in its sharpest individuality. Then Chris- 
tians would better understand each other, and the 
unwary would not be beguiled. 

We find a difficulty in framing an argument against 
the theory of man here drawn out. An argument 
starts from premises that are self-evident, and pro- 
ceeds to conclusions that were not. But we could 
not start with any thing more obvious than the axiom, 
that no man is guilty for what took place before he 
was born. We could not get back to any premises 
more self-evident than the absurdity which these 
propositions start with. They begin where reason- 
ing generally ends. The result of a reductio ad ab- 
surdum, which generally comes out at the end of a 
demonstration, they put at the beginning as a truth 
assumed. How unprofitable, then, this whole contro- 
versy ! How much better for the parties rather to 
cease from their logic and examine in a friendly way 
their logical machinery, if perchance they may find 
whose it is that is so out of joint, that in the moral 
calculus it refuses to give the result that two and two 
make four ! 

There is another reason why it is not worth while 
to enter on this branch of the subject. Pleasing 



16 THE NATURAL MAN. 

omens already indicate that this form of belief is 
ceasing to become active. We lay it off, then, in the 
persuasion that it is taking its place among the fos- 
silized remains of a former theologic world, which 
old convulsions had turned up and left bare' to our 
wondering and curious gaze. 

There is another view which may briefly be stated 
thus. Men, as they now come into the world, are in 
the same moral state in which the first man was cre- 
ated. His sin affected no one but himself; and hu- 
man nature is not changed by the fall. The farther 
we trace the stream of life towards its beginning, the 
purer we find it, and with every one it is perfectly 
pure at the period of infancy. Man's true culture, 
then, is the development of his powers from within 
outward, under such external aids as this probation 
affords. "What is corrupt comes to him from with- 
out, from wrong education, from vicious example, 
from the influence of a bad state of society. He 
starts in life entirely disconnected with the past, and 
has only to choose the good or the evil that is offered 
him. 

This theory of man, which " cuts the thread of his- 
tory from behind us every hour," is here stated very 
nearly as it came from the lips of its reputed framer,* 
and with some modifications and additions it has 
maintained its integrity for ages in the progress of 
human opinion. Its history has run nearly parallel 
with that of the doctrine first described, perhaps 

* See the account of the system of Pelagius, Murdock's Mosheim, 
Vol. I. p. 371. 



THEORIES. 17 

sometimes borrowing from it a darker tinge than its 
own, or a clothing from its mystic phraseology. May 
we suggest that it is a survey of human nature only 
upon the surface, without sounding its mystic and 
troubled deep ? Hence those who adopt it so often 
recede from it as the mysteries that lie within suc- 
cessively reveal themselves. Hence a church formed 
around this as one of its central principles will sel- 
dom retain that class of minds whose habits of thought 
are ascetic or introspective, or whose deep and surg- 
ing sensibilities demand some potent voice to guide 
and to soothe them, some light to explain their dark 
and terrible on-goings. Its recruits come from the 
side of the world; not from those who had before 
left it, and are passing on to deeper experiences. 

The first theory so merges the individual in the 
species, that he is there lost and buried in one solid 
and gloomy mass of corruption, and the sin of one 
man was the sin of all. By the last it is resolved 
back into that extreme individualism which admits 
of no unitary life, but makes it exist in fragments or 
in endless and independent atoms. Does this last 
meet the facts of history, of consciousness, of revealed 
truth, better than the other ? Does it meet the de- 
mands that come up from the profounder depths of 
human nature itself? We shall see, while, having 
done with the negative side of the question, we now 
advance to the positive. 



CHAPTER, II. 

HEREDITARY CORRUPTION. 

" Though all animals be fitted by nature for the life -which their instincts teach 
them to pursue, naturalists have learned to recognize certain aberrant and muti- 
lated forms, in which the type of the special class to which they belong seems dis- 
torted and degraded And now, in the times of the high-placed human 

destiny of those formally delegated monarchs of the creation whose nature it is to 
look behind them upon the past and before them with fear and mingled hope upon 
the future, do we not as certainly see the elements of an ever-sinking state of 'degra- 
dation which is to exist for ever, as of a state of ever-increasing perfectibility to 
which there is to be no end ? " — Footprints of the Creator. 

There is a distinction, obvious to any one, be- 
tween original sin and original propensities to sin; 
between hereditary guilt and hereditary evil. Man 
is guilty for what passes into wrong action through 
his free volitions ; for what is wrong in his volitions, 
but not for what is wrong in his original structure. 
He is guilty, not for the wrong dispositions he inher- 
its, but for the wrong dispositions which he admits 
into his own voluntary life; not for the depravity 
that was innate, but for the depravity that passes 
into conduct. His original moral constitution, 
whether good or bad, he could not control any 
more than he could control the color of his complex- 
ion ; and he is no more responsible for the one than 
the other. Hence the obvious distinction between a 
nature which is sinful and a nature which is depraved. 



HEREDITARY CORRUPTION. 19 

Putting theories aside, we now come to the stern 
facts of experience and history. "We must take 
these, not as we would have them, but as we find 
them. Hereditary sin or transmitted guilt is an 
idea which cannot be conceived without conflict of 
thought, or expressed, but in terms of self-contra- 
diction. 

But transmissive dispositions, and proclivities to 
evil, coming- doivn along a line of tainted ancestry, and 
gathering strength and volume on their way by every 
generation that transmits them, is a fact that is univer- 
sal, and so an irreversible laiv of human descent. 

In unfolding the evidence of this proposition, let 
us commence with statements of a general nature, 
which challenge universal assent, and whose truth is 
open to the eyes of all. 

"What, then, is the actual condition of the race ? 
Taken in the mass, it lies in spiritual darkness, each 
generation receiving from the past its gloomy super- 
stitions and horrid idolatries. A race in its true 
condition, not less than a family or a state, would 
form a certain organic whole. It would be a family 
of nations, society in its grandest form, and that a 
form of beneficence, taking up every people and 
every tribe into one circulatory system of benefits 
and blessings, that poured life and happiness from 
all to each and from each to all. Diplomacy, trade, 
commerce, would form a grand system, that kept 
girdling the globe with charities, or perhaps rather 
the arteries and veins that kept sending life into all 
the members, and bringing it back. Instead of this, 



20 THE NATURAL MAN. 

the nations and peoples are fallen asunder ; we de- 
bate whether they belong to the same species ; each 
is parted off to its solitary darkness and its bloody 
customs, and they present the spectacle of the frag- 
ments of a mighty ruin. 

But survey the fragments themselves, and what 
do we find? Each organized around its favorite 
falsehood, or else disorganized altogether, as is the 
case with the savage tribes. They present the spec- 
tacle of class preying upon class, the weak lying as 
victims to the power of the strong. If you choose 
to except the Christian nations, which are no excep- 
tions at all, yet remember that three fourths of the 
world lie under the night of barbarism, and need, 
not merely improvement, but re-creation out of chaos. 
And let us remember that the mission of Christian- 
ity was not development^ but reconstruction* Its 
history would show how slowly the work is done. 
A distinguished statesman of the last century de- 
clared that the history of nations was a record of 
wrongs, and that the offices of kindness which one 
nation had rendered to another would not fill ten 
pages of its annals. The signs of a better day 
which now appear would mitigate, but hardly re- 
verse, his judgment. 

Now we must not look exclusively at the individ- 
ual virtues that bloom out among every people. We 
must survey human nature through its grand organ- 
izations, and accept the fact that evil and wrong are 
not functional, but organic also. And we must also 

* Isa. lx.; Rom. viii. 19-22; Isa. lxviii. 12. 



HEREDITARY CORRUPTION. 21 

remember that we are surveying a race of which we 
ourselves are members, and that our judgment is ex- 
posed to the sway of its corruptions. Could we rise 
out of it, and survey it from a point outside ; could 
we look down upon it with an angel's eye, from 
some mild-beaming and sinless planet, and take into 
one view the bloody march of its history, though we 
might not say with Mr. Burke, that this earth is the 
" bedlam of the solar system," we should certainly 
allow that it lay in wickedness, and that we surveyed 
the moral ruins of an apostate world. 

Passing on to a view not quite so general, we 
come to the fact that the human species fall into di- 
visions of races, and that each race has its own pecu- 
liar life and type of character descending through in- 
numerable generations. Time, culture, and physical 
environments exert their plastic power within a cer- 
tain range; but during three or four generations, and, 
indeed, during any known historical periods, they 
never break up the type. The origin of races is a 
question from which we retire. It is all the same, as 
regards this argument, whether the streams of mi- 
gration first radiated from one or from many centres. 
We simply point to the fact, that each bears along 
its own qualities and colorings, which do not disap- 
pear through series of ages ; that they become more 
distinctive in their divergence, and cut their channels 
deeper as they flow. The African is torn from his 
native groves, and driven through every variety of 
clime and fortune, but his ancestral life he never 
loses. The cold of Canadian hills does not freeze it 



22 THE NATURAL MAN. 

up. The fire of tropical suns does not melt it out 
of him. The Jew floats on for ever, an element in 
the world's population, which all its attritions cannot 
break in pieces, nor its fiercest surges dissolve. Let 
art and civilization cover up this ancestral life under 
fairer forms and shows ; let time file away its rougher 
features as man emerges out of barbarism, and then 
let the old temptations encircle him anew, and the 
old spirit will sweep through him and reappear. 
Refinement of manners and national comity will 
give way before it like threads of gossamer. A desire 
for his neighbor's lands was the unappeasable greed 
of the Anglo-Saxon and his cognate tribes, emerging 
grimly out of the Cimbric forests, and pouring suc- 
cessive waves of conquest over England. After the 
lapse of a thousand years, its motions are beating 
over the Mexican and the Sikh, in a resurgent wave 
of the same barbarism. 

When a nation is composed of the same race, 
and is therefore homogeneous, a national life and 
national character become developed, the most in- 
tense and distinctive. Individuals become members 
of the same collective body, thrilled by its pulse, 
and marching to the same drill. They form one 
medium for the same mighty spirit which sways the 
individual, as the music-master touches to one tune 
all the strings of his lyre. Nor does it make any 
difference when its master minds disappear from the 
earth, except that the national life becomes still 
more deep and intensive. As if they departed only 
to come nearer on the spiritual side, and breathe on 



HEREDITARY CORRUPTION. 23 

the souls of the living, they become its gods and he- 
roes, and live in its history and its songs. The past 
is alive in the present, and common vices and virtues 
are perpetuated, and stamp the same lines on indi- 
vidual character. The same hatreds • descend from 
parent to child, increasing in rancor on their way. 
If the common life is prevailingly corrupt, the corrup- 
tion will thus channel its bed deeper and broader, till 
the last barriers break away. It destroys the organi- 
zation through which it acted : the nation's life is 
consummated : it falls in pieces, and perishes miser- 
ably from the face of the earth. This was the 
" progress and termination " of the Jewish common- 
wealth, and all its neighboring nations. 

But we suppose that the educationists of a certain 
school might here say, This is all the result of bad 
example and influence ; take the youth out of this 
corrupt society, and from amid those unpropitious 
circumstances, and all would be changed. Waiving 
now the question whence originated this corrupt so- 
ciety and these unpropitious circumstances, we will 
only say that it would be exceedingly edifying to see 
this notion brought to the test of experiment. Let 
the educationist take the babe of the Bushman, and 
rock him in a New England cradle and a New Eng- 
land home, and see if a New England character 
would be produced as his natural faculties unfold. 
We do not say that he would grow up the same be- 
ing that he would in his native society, under the re- 
creative agencies that now act upon him ; but who- 
ever denies that the instincts, biases, and impulses of 



24 THE NATURAL MAN. 

his tribe would surely appear and enter as an inde- 
structible element into his character, denies what ev- 
ery naturalist knows to be true. The outward man 
even to the body, the most external clothing of the 
spirit, is shaped and moulded in some sort by the 
faculties that lie within. And this holds not of mere 
feature and expression, but of the whole internal 
structure of brain, nerve, and muscle, making the 
entire human form the exponent of the soul. The 
ancestral spirit, by a sort of elective affinity, appro- 
priates the matter and form that shall fitly configure 
and manifest its own peculiar life. So that the nat- 
uralist, as soon as he looks on the human form, 
though it be that of the sleeping child, knows the 
race, and sometimes the tribe and family, to which it 
is to be referred; and he knows, unless some pow- 
erful countervailing agencies come in, the forms of 
domestic and social life, including customs, man- 
ners, art, worship, in which the spirit within will 
seek embodiment and exercise. The ancient ten- 
dencies have the moulding of us, then, before we are 
born. In their book " all our members are written." 
They shape and tone the finest tissues of our mental, 
moral, and physical structure, ere yet we have seen 
the light. So that the infant bears the stamp of his 
lineage, and is himself the configuration of the old 
ancestral spirit. Where a race is on a course of de- 
generation and moral decay, we see it in the forms 
and features of the youngest offspring. "Where there 
is purity, intelligence, and celestial love, they put on 
the forms of masculine dignity, womanly grace, and 



HEREDITARY CORRUPTION. 25 

those early spiritual charms that beam out from 
within all conscious and personal attainments ; but 
there are tribes of men of whom just the reverse is 
true, and where humanity recedes and sinks down 
through the whole scale of brutal deformity, where 
what is manly is almost lost and what is brutal al- 
most alone appears, where the brow retreats away, 
and the lower features project forward, which the 
lowest appetites and fiendish passions have made 
their own disgusting image. 

All violations of the divine laws, as they pervade 
our entire constitution, tend not only to individual 
ruin, but the degradation of species. The tribes to 
which we have just referred hold a relation to the 
whole human family, such as monsters and idiots 
hold to the particular families in which they are 
born. Malformations of mind and body are referable 
to preexistent infractions of these laws, and some- 
times many generations intervene between the causes 
and their ultimate and dismal results. This is a 
law of transmission through all known grades of be- 
ing. It is not peculiar to man, but it runs along the 
descending scale of all created natures below him. 
It underlies all the phenomena of reproduction, 
growth, and decay. And the malformation ranges 
through the vast interval between the first slight dis- 
tortion from the fair and symmetrical original, to 
where the distortion is complete in monster individ- 
uals of a family, or monster families of a species.* 

* See an interesting chapter in Miller's Footprints of the Creator, 
on the degradation of species. 



26 THE NATURAL MAN. 

If we narrow down our sphere of observation 
from races and nations to private households, we 
get illustrations of the law of descent which are 
familiar to all. The resemblance which was general 
becomes more and more special till we come down 
to single families. How notorious is the fact, that 
the peculiar mental, moral, and physical qualities of 
the parents are coined anew and expressed in the 
features and toned in the temperaments of the chil- 
dren! When children of the same family have been 
separated wide asunder, and the streams of migra- 
tion have diverged into regions having no intercom- 
munication, and the modifying influences of cli- 
mate, marriage with other families, and diversified 
occupations have been at work two hundred years, 
still we have known the stranger pass from one 
region to the other and point out the common de- 
scendants before hearing their names. Thus habits 
of mind become inwrought and infibred with the 
natures of offspring. And thus fearful are our re- 
sponsibilities, for such is the poison or the healing 
virtue which we infuse into the stream of being that 
sweeps by us. According to the life within which 
we choose to cherish and manifest, we leave an in- 
heritance of blessing or a cleaving curse to the gen- 
erations ! 

Scarcely less in form and feature than in language 
are the transmissive qualities and dispositions of a 
people to be discerned. Language is never an as- 
semblage of arbitrary signs among the people with 
whom it is native and living. It is the crystalliza- 



HEREDITARY CORRUPTION. 27 

tion of their most interior mind, and it shows the 
most peculiar colorings of their thought and senti- 
ment fixed and preserved. Hereditary dispositions 
not only shape the features, but the vocal organs ; 
and they give them that tone, compass, texture, and 
flexibility, whereby they shall prepare for themselves 
an appropriate utterance. They form their own 
gamut, and then they rise and fall through it as 
they will. They shape the human lyre for their 
own use, and then they sweep it with their own 
music. We know that every animal species is born 
into the instinctive use of a natural language, whose 
signs are uniform from age to age. Just as true is 
it that the same propensities in men will seek the 
same expression, and pre-adapt the organs to every 
shade of meaning, and that these organs are touched 
by the hereditary life and toned by the ancestral spirit, 
— for it is spirit that appropriates matter and moulds 
it and makes it flexile to its uses. Hence those who 
have strong mental and spiritual affinities soon 
learn and speak each other's language ; but let the 
children of a people long savage and brutalized be 
taught a language flexile to the higher sentiments, 
and then be left to themselves. They will most as- 
suredly sink such a language into miserable barba- 
risms, which, though not cognate with their own 
tongue, shall be allied to it in sound. For it is not 
they that speak, but a line of foul ancestry is speak- 
ing through them. The missionaries, when trans- 
lating the Bible into the tongues of native savages, 
put the best Christianity into those tongues that 



28 THE NATURAL MAN. 

they will hold. It is curious sometimes to render 
back literally, and see the Christianity that comes 
out of them. Let our educationist take the young- 
est child of the Polynesian savage, and teach him 
to speak with " pure tone " the dialect of mercy. 
Or if he can find a lineal representative of a tribe 
of the Northern forests, whose language Pfitchard 
says " resembles the cries of wild beasts rather than 
the sounds of the human voice," since bestial passions 
so long had growled through its gutterals, let him 
train his larynx at once to vibrate to the soft sounds 
and the breezy motion of Tuscan airs. Scrip- 
ture saith that the primitive men had first one lan- 
guage and "one lip." But they "travelled from 
the East" ; they left the golden regions of that love 
by which human thoughts and sentiments are fused 
together and find harmonious utterance, and the 
primitive language was resolved into jangling dia- 
lects, each the howl of some selfish passion, — like 
a strain of many parts breaking down into discords, 
when each is glad to withdraw his part from the 
o-eneral clans. And hence the dispersion of ancient 
and of every modern Babel. 



CHAPTER III. 

ACQUIRED INSTINCTS. 

" It might be sufficient, perhaps, to state the well-known fact, that dispositions 
and propensities, and consequently all habits that have acquired the force of these, 
are actually transmitted to descendants." — Kinmont's Natural History of Man. 

We suppose that, if Pelagius were to rise from 
his repose, he might bring an objection somewhat 
on this wise. The facts which have now been 
stated do not prove any innate depravation of hu- 
man nature. All its propensities are in themselves 
good. They only become depraved through volun- 
tary perversion and abuse. The senses are all good, 
and even the animal appetites and passions. Things 
in themselves good may be used either for good 
or evil purposes. Appetite is for self-preservation, 
desire for property is to excite to industry, combat- 
iveness to defend the right, reason to investigate 
truth, and reverence to worship God. If in their 
perversion they produce licentiousness, avarice, mur- 
der, sophistry, and superstition, the fault lies in the 
use and not in the possession, and so all that is in 
man is originally good and pure. 

If the traveller, musing amid the splendid ruins 
of Palmyra, should see in the broken entablatures, 



30 THE NATURAL MAN. 

and tottering porticos, and columns half buried in 
rubbish and sand, the city of the desert queen in 
its primitive glory, his imagination, we suppose, 
would be deemed somewhat fertile and illusive. All 
that he sees in itself is good and beautiful, and 
once formed structures through whose halls passed 
a train of joyous beings, or around whose domestic 
altars clustered the virtues and charities. All the 
parts of those structures may be there still, but not 
with their original adaptations and symmetries, and 
that makes all the difference between a city in its 
splendor and a city in its ruins. 

Man loses none of his faculties in the process of 
his deterioration, but he does lose their original sym- 
metry and harmony. There is a certain relation 
between sense and reason and affection, which 
makes man's mind the fresh print and copy of the 
Creator's. There is that distortion, or complete in- 
version, which makes it the image of the demon's. 
Sense may serve the reason, or reason may be the 
subject of sense. Affection-may be placed supremely 
on God or on self. The faculties may be toned and 
harmonized, and move in heavenly order, giving a 
sense of that wholeness and complete unity which 
exist in the Divine nature. This unity may be 
broken up, and hence there may arise the sense of 
inward conflict, as if nature by some dire convulsion 
were riven asunder. Human nature, to be trans- 
mitted in its purity, must be transmitted not only 
with all its original powers, but in its divine pro- 
portions and harmonies. If it comes with the sen- 



ACQUIRED INSTINCTS. 31 

suous powers developed into monstrous and morbid 
action, and the reason shorn of its brightness, it is 
a nature darkened and distorted, and therefore de- 
praved. 

Dr. South thus nobly describes the understanding 
of man in paradise : " It was then sublime, clear, 
and aspiring, and as it were the soul's upper region, 
lofty and serene, free from the vapors and disturb- 
ances of the inferior affections. In sum, it was 
quick and lively, open as the day, untainted as the 
morning, full of the innocence and spxightliness of 
youth ; it gave the soul a full, bright view into all 
things, and was not only a window, but itself a pros- 
pect." The reason, in its sinless and crystal clear- 
ness, receives into itself the images of heavenly 
things, as the limpid lake receives and copies the 
overhanging scenery. But as man sinks lower and 
lower into the outward, he loses the power of spirit- 
ual sight and intuition, and when darkened and 
buried under the foldings of sense, immortality be- 
comes, not a perception, but a tradition. The light 
from within and from above is shut out, and the 
external world alone is real. The mind gropes after 
truth, through the painful steps of a darkling and 
a drudging logic, on its " dim and perilous way " 
through the mazes of error, of doubt, and denial. 
Hence came the necessity of a revelation from with- 
out. It was not necessary when reason was a clear 
glass that mirrored back the skies. But when the 
; * inner light " sank down amid the vapors and dis- 
turbances of the inferior affections, till it ceased to 



32 THE NATURAL MAN. 

shine clearly, and the feet stumbled on the dark 
mountains, revelation came with its outward signs. 
Christ appeared with the power of miracle, — evi- 
dence addressed to the senses, since into sense men 
had so grosssly fallen, — and while it shows the Di- 
vine condescension, it shows in just the same degree 
the fall and the distortion of the human powers. 

But there is another fact which is a full answer to 
the objection we have in hand. Though man loses 
none of his original faculties, — since in that case he 
would cease to be man, — he does acquire new and 
corrupt tastes and impulses, and these in their turn 
become transmissive. This is a fact as well known 
and established, not only in respect to man, but 
all species that have the power of reproduction, as 
any other fact in natural history. JThere are certain 
acquired instincts that perpetuate themselves, and 
change the habits, and sometimes degrade the race, 
in that line of descent. Not to write out a chapter 
in natural history, let the reader consult to his sat- 
isfaction the interesting section of Pritchard on that 
subject.* It is a well-known fact, that the vice of 
intemperance is propagated in this way ; the dis- 
eased appetite descending from sire to son as a bale- 
ful heritage of corruption. As a single fact often 
weighs more with some minds than a volume of ar- 
gument, we are tempted to relate one which comes 
on authority that cannot be questioned. A drunken 
parent had several sons, all of whom, with one ex- 

■ Natural History of Man, Ssc. VIII. 



ACQUIRED INSTINCTS. 33 

ception, fell into the same degradation as himself. 
That son maintained his virtue, but the conflict was 
long and fearful. The depraved appetite which he 
never indulged, followed him and tormented him 
as if the word " rum " was rung by some demon 
into his ears. Resistance at last silenced the demon 
and drove him out. Such force is there in a human 
will when fortified by the spirit of God ; but when 
the barrier gives way again and again through a 
series of generations, the tide of corruption gathers 
volume and velocity till it sweeps the barriers before 
it like rushwork, and the whole nature is given up 
to desolation. 

But there are depraved affections and tempers, 
witnessed on a yet wider scale, which can never be- 
long to an untainted moral constitution. The in- 
stinct of self-defence we will not arraign ; but pleas- 
ure in the infliction of pain, which is the essence of 
all cruelty, and which fills the world with mourning, 
is the sure mark of a nature branded with the curse 
of Cain. It is first seen in the child who tortures 
the insect for his pastime, or who roams abroad, not 
to rejoice in the happiness that gushes from fields 
and groves, but to murder God's innocent creatures 
and mangle them in pieces. It is seen among men 
in that love of war for its own sake, which consti- 
tutes the very soul of murder. The business of war 
is entered upon, not as a work of horrible necessity, 
but as a work which affords a certain class of ac- 
quired instincts their keenest relish. Its art is con- 
templated with pleasurable emotions not less lively 



34 THE NATURAL MAN. 

than those of the sculptor when breathing over his 
work the prayer of Pygmalion.* There are powers 
in man which need only to be restored to their first 
symmetry and order. The acquired and demonizing 
instincts of cruelty and revenge, need not to be re- 
stored, but purged away. 

The history of every acquired instinct would dis- 
close three distinct stages of development. There 
is, first, the transient emotion which ebbs and flows. 
Then there is the fixed mood of mind into which it 
settles down, when it operates an organic change in 
the moral, and thence in the physical structure. And, 
lastly, there is the altered constitution reproduced in 
the offspring. Anger at first is a flash of fire. An- 
ger hoarded up becomes hate, and it settles into the 
brow and grates through the tones of the voice. 
Love at first may be an emotion that comes and 
goes. Then it is a fixed principle, beaming out of 
the heart so as to transfigure the whole person, and 
create a new face under the ugliest features. And 
the aversions of hate or the appetencies of love 
often appear in the next generation, in the transmit- 
ted feuds of families and nations, or in the heavenly 
inheritance of that good- will which was the burden 



* " I ordered the artillery to be posted on a hill near the town and 
overlooking it, and open its fire. Now ensued the most beautiful sight 
conceivable." 

" The storming of was a magnificent spectacle. WJiat a 

glorious feeling of elation took possession of my soul at that moment" — Liv- 
ermore's War with Mexico, Chap. XXVI. — But see the literature 
of war passim. 



ACQUIRED INSTINCTS. 35 

of the angel-song. The first two stages in the nat- 
ural history of the passions, we witness daily in 
ourselves or in those about us, — how evil pas- 
sions run down the nerves and shake them out of 
tune, till the whole frame, though once like an organ 
of sweet stops, will discourse nothing but j anglings 
and discords, — how corruption out of the heart will 
flood the brain and darken its " chambers of im- 
agery," and thence derange all the vital functions of 
soul and body. Or, on the other hand, how pure 
affections, passing into high, rational, and spiritual 
frames, transform the whole man and create him 
anew ; how benevolence works its changes from 
within, and makes the outer clothing of the spirit to 
be radiant and white as the light ; how faith lays 
the soul to rest in the arms of God ; how hope, from 
its first fond flutterings at the heart, changes into con- 
fidence and trust, when " wings at our shoulders seem 
to play," and bear us away from care and trouble into 
an atmosphere which is bracing and serene. He who 
denies that these opposite states of mind, after be- 
coming fixed and habitual, affect the natural tempers 
and dispositions of offspring, shows that the simplest 
guardians of the nursery might teach him wisdom. 
Hence the path of endless progress that opens up- 
ward into light, or of endless deterioration that 
slopes downward into darkness and death. 



CHAPTER IV. 

TESTIMONY OE CONSCIOUSNESS. 



" It is not what my hands have done 

That weighs my spirit down, 
That casts a shadow o'er the sun, 

And over earth a frown. 
It is not any heinous guilt, 

Or vice by men abhorred ; 
Tor fair the fame that I have built, 

A fair life's just reward, — 
And men would wonder if they knew 
How sad I feel, with sins so few. 

Alas ! they only see in part, 

When thus they judge the whole ; 
They cannot look upon the heart, 

They cannot read the soul. 
But I survey myself within, 

And mournfully I feel 
How deep the principle of sin 

Its root may there conceal, 
And spread its poison through the frame, 
"Without a deed that men can blame." 

Henry Ware, Jr. 

" It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." — Romans vii. 17. 



There is a large class of minds, ranging through 
all nations, sects, and ages, which, though differing 
in their theologies, have a singular agreement as to 
the facts of consciousness. They draw various con- 
clusions from these facts, but they bear uniform tes- 
timony as to the facts themselves. The testimony 



TESTIMONY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 37 

is substantially this, — that some evil forces within, 
lying deeper than their personal volitions, or acquired 
tastes, and antedating all their culture and habits, 
are seeking to possess and to sway their faculties. 
They give to the individual the feeling of divided 
consciousness. And this feeling is stronger just in 
the degree that the religious experience becomes 
more deep and vital. The more the interior man is 
searched and laid open by the word of God, the 
clearer are the demonstrations of this divided con- 
sciousness ; and it seems to the individual that two 
classes of powers are ranged in opposition and seek- 
ing for the dominion of his nature. This conflict, 
perhaps, did not appear except under the light of 
Christian truth bursting on the soul in clearer splen- 
dor, — like the sun rising on a field where hosts are 
gathered and arrayed for battle, but which lay in 
stillness on their arms until the morning light should 
appear. Those who live a life merely natural, and 
outwardly blameless, yet who have never brought 
the most interior life under the judgments of the 
eternal law, have no such experience as we here 
describe. But it is conspicuously displayed in the 
lives of such men as Luther, Fenelon, Taylor, Bun- 
yan, Fox, Edwards, and Ware, and the more so as 
the interior nature emerged out of dim twilight into 
open day, where all things appeared, not in mass, but 
distributed, and with their shape and quality con- 
fessed. Now the question may be raised, whether 
those moods be healthful or morbid, and whether the 
facts of consciousness are here rendered truly ; but 

4 



38 THE NATURAL MAN. 

the question will hardly fail of a right answer, if we 
remember that oftenest out of these moods has come 
a robust and fervid piety, oblivious of self, earnest 
for great deeds and sacrifices, and with words that 
speak most effectively to the condition of sinful men. 
Yea, what mind penetrated with religious ideas has 
never been resolved into this same double conscious- 
ness, however dimly ? Has the reader never, in the 
stillness of meditation and earnest introspection, had 
revealed to him the breadth and the purity of God's 
law, shining down into his soul as the serene al- 
mighty justice, and searching out all that was in op- 
position to itself? And in that all-revealing hour has 
he not been prompted to exclaim, " I am a man of 
unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean 
lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of 
hosts " ? Has he not then seen a law in his mem- 
bers, warring against the law that shines down into 
his mind, waking up the old conflict which Paul has 
described in such living language ? — God's voice 
calling one way, and a tide of inclinations and a 
throng of fancies sweeping the other way, which will 
not return nor subside at his bidding, — opposing 
powers, impersonating themselves in him and call- 
ing and answering to each other ? Then he verifies 
anew the language of Paul, no longer a paradox, — 
" What I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that 
I do." Some mighty power is standing behind his 
personal volitions, and bending and swaying his fac- 
ulties at its will, so that he does not seem so much 
to act and speak himself, as to be acted through and 



TESTIMONY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 39 

to be spoken out of. " It is no more I that do it, but 
sin that dwelleth in me." And what is the meaning 
of all this, unless it be that this sea of being, out of 
which we rise like bubbles out of some mighty deep, 
has its under tides and currents, whose force and 
swell have increased from remote generations, and 
they break into our consciousness, and we tremble 
with their motions and struggle against the down- 
ward rush of the waves ? 



CHAPTER V. 

CHILDHOOD. 



Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
Upon the growing boy." 



There are two classes of qualities which appear 
in infancy and early childhood. There is the sweet 
smile of innocence, — the beautiful play of natural 
affection as it jets forth in a thousand fantastic 
shapes; natural sensibility, clear and gushing as 
spring-waters ; imaginations white as falling snow- 
flakes, and whose furniture is yet unsullied as that 
of an angel's dream. Not that these are the uniform 
characteristics of this early age, but that they are 
very common, none but a cynic will deny. In what 
light they are to be regarded as elements of charac- 
ter and indications of the real state of man by nature, 
is a topic which we waive for the present, as belong- 
ing to another branch of our subject. 

But to select these as the only characteristics of 
childhood were surely as uncandid as it would be to 
select the opposite ones and ignore these, and, like 
Calvin, compare children with vipers and serpents. 
If, as we have already seen, hereditary qualities are 
wrought into the mental, moral, and physical organi- 



CHILDHOOD. 41 

zation of offspring, and appear in the earliest form 
and features and make them the effigy of themselves, 
then we should expect to find inborn tendencies and 
biases to evil among the earliest manifestations. 
And so we do. Those beautiful traits are set with- 
in the ugly and depraved ones, and often overlaid by 
them, so that their beauty goes out for ever. That 
anger, deceit, irreverence, stubbornness, cruelty, and 
selfishness, in many a hideous form, are qualities 
which show themselves so early and with such entire 
spontaneity as proves them to be innate and heredi- 
tary, none, we take it, but dreamers will deny. And 
that they are developed out of the infant being, and 
not put into him by bad example, that they appear 
among the best encircling influences of home, and 
before example good or bad could be felt or under- 
stood, is a matter of daily experience. How often is 
it found that a sweet and sunny spirit is enshrined in 
an evil temperament amid biases to every wrong, — 
a rose that opens beneath overhanging briers that 
spring up and choke it and shut out the light till it 
lies away ! 

Even when the first manifestations of infant life 
are all pure and lovely, it is no sufficient argument 
to prove the absence of hereditary damage and dis- 
order. The human soul is a germ whose unfoldings 
are to go on through the infinite ages, and not till 
its development proceeds apace are all its hidden 
tendencies brought to light. The blight and the 
canker may lie concealed when the first leaves dis- 
close nothing but health ; nay, the reason why the 



42 - THE NATURAL MAN. 

disease does not at first appear often is, that it lies 
so deep. How many are the foldings that are 
wrapped about us ! — nature within nature, life with- 
in life, each to wake up and put forth its power, as 
the objects of temptation shall warm them into 
activity and draw them forth by their attractive 
charms. Around the spirit of that little being who 
slumbers in the cradle, there is a sensuous nature 
which includes the ovaries of the worst of vices, but 
which do not even give intimations of their exist- 
ence until the dawn of manhood. Passions are 
there, coiled up and sleeping, which never yet have 
stirred, but which one day may strike their serpent 
fangs through that tender bosom. There is the pos- 
sessory instinct, early grasping for what is not its 
own, out of which will come avarice with its sordid 
train. There is revenge, that thirsts for blood. There 
is the lust of the flesh, that will grovel in the sty of 
sensuality. There is the pride of life, with its empty 
pomps and glittering shams. There is cunning, that 
will seek its end by serpent windings. There is the 
lust of power, that will tread out humanity under its 
feet and " shut the gates of mercy on mankind." 
All are there, and if no re-creative power shall infuse 
healing virtue and restore heavenly order, these hid- 
den forces shall surely come forth and be dramatized 
on the face of the earth, and ravage it in their terri- 
ble outgoings. All culture superinduced from with- 
out, all mere education, will have no other effect than 
to furnish these propensities with more keen and 
polished weapons to do their work. For education 



CHILDHOOD. 43 

(e-ducens) is the leading out of these terrible armies. 
Left to themselves, they might rush out in savage dis- 
order. A skilful hand may marshal them into exact 
discipline and brilliant array, not for private crime, 
but for speeding the bloody march of an unchristian 
civilization, or the consolidation of its oppressive 
power. And this is all. 

From the fact that the evil spiritual forces which 
come down from the past with cumulative strength 
develop themselves only at successive stages of in- 
dividual history, that they often lie concealed and 
bide their time, it results that men are often impelled 
into crimes which surprise even themselves, when 
some new field of temptation awakens the latent 
depravity, and the fearful mystery opens up into the 
consciousness for the first time. Hence, too, a pro- 
phetic eye sometimes reads the deep things of the 
spirit and sees its frightful history unrolled while the 
external man seems fair. The prophet looked into 
the face of Ahaz, then a blameless young man, and 
turned away and wept. Visions of ravaged king- 
doms rose before him. All that Julius Caesar was 
to be, was in like manner open to the eye of a 
sagacious Roman, when to the common eye all was 
patriotism and generosity. " Take care ! there is 
many a tyrant and usurper in the person of that 
young man." 

Those transmissive qualities of the human being 
which at first are latent, and whose activities are 
prospective, are revealed, or at least illustrated, in 
the physical man, which is the effigy of the moral. 



44 THE NATURAL MAN. 

It is a fact too familiar to be controverted, that the 
first years of infancy and childhood open ofttimes 
with the bloom of health and the promise of a vig- 
orous manhood. But by and by the hereditary 
taint appears. The growth of the body unfolds the 
lurking malady, and the death wrapped up in a show 
of life appears. So families, and even tribes, perish 
from the earth, under the cumulative corruption 
which the stream of being in that direction bears 
along. The years of the generations grow less and 
less. They dwindle to a span, and then to nothing. 
They fail from the ranks of humanity, and leave 
only their names and their graves. And the man 
who should reason from first appearances in the cra- 
dle or the nursery against this stern law of human 
descent, would reason just as soundly as he who 
should deny the spiritual death included within the 
too transparent disguises of infantile innocence and 
beauty. For there are many innate propensities 
which do not show themselves until the carnal na- 
ture unfolds and warms them into conscious exist- 
ence. The babe shows not the diseased appetite 
of drunken progenitors, but the surroundings of 
temptation may stir it up in the man. Nay, it may 
assert itself with perfect spontaneity, and with no 
external excitements. There are men of bland and 
gentle manners in private life, who will say, that on 
the field of battle, with the measured march of num- 
bers, the martial music, and the presence of a foe, no 
sight is so lovely as that of falling and bleeding 
ranks, no work so sweet and genial as that of mur- 



CHILDHOOD. 45 

der. The young of the tiger, it is said, may be do- 
mesticated, and for a while made mild and docile ; 
but the first taste of blood will rouse all his native 
instincts ; and his eye turns to fire, and he bounds in 
fury to the jungles ! 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE MYSTERY OE DEATH. 

" Fair daffodils ! we weep to see 
You haste away so soon ; 
As yet the early rising sun 
Has not attained its noon. 

Stay, stay, 
Until the hasting day 

Has run, 
But to the even-song, 
And, having prayed together, we 
"Will go with you along. 

" We have short time to stay as you ; 
We have as short a spring ; 
As quick a growth to meet decay 
As you or any thing. 

We die 
As your hours do, and dry 

Away, 
Like to the summer's rain, 
Or like the pearls of morning's dew, 
Ne'er to be found again." — Herrick. 

Death is described in all languages as a monster 
and anomaly in the universe. It is the kingly ter- 
ror, the sum of all the agonies which afflict human 
nature. "Where is the path on which its pale shad- 
ow hath not rested ? "Who does not remember the 
time when the stern fact of mortality broke in upon 
the gay fancies of his childhood, as the one giant 



THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 47 

sorrow for which there was no consolation. It 
would seem, sometimes, from the prevailing tone of 
our religious literature, as if the principal office of 
Christianity were to pour light and consolation over 
this one province of calamity. One would think, 
from much of our preaching, that the chief motive 
to religion was the fright that comes from this 
haunting spectre, whose approach must be made 
the dread of all our pleasant places. It is the " last 
enemy." It is the " cup of trembling." It is the 
" ultima linea rerum" — the dread boundary of joy- 
ous existence. 

This calamity is peculiar to man. The inferior 
tribes know nothing of it. They obey the laws of 
their life, and so they have no dread of what is to 
come. The lamb gambols alike through the green 
pastures or to the place of slaughter. Up to the 
last nutter of her wings, the bird ceases not to trill 
her matins upon the air. But the only immortal 
being upon the earth lives in dread of death. The 
only being to whom death is an impossibility, fears 
every day that it will come. And if we analyze the 
nature of this fear, and explore the cause of it, we 
shall not be at all certain that it will not follow the 
mere natural man into a future life, and have an im- 
portant part in its retributions. Man fears death only 
because he has lost conscious communion with Him 
in whom alone is immortality. In so far as we pre- 
serve our relation to Him who is the soul of our soul 
and the life of our life, our spirits wear the bloom of 
everlasting youth, and no more than the joyous 



48 THE NATURAL MAN. 

child do we dream of consumption and decay. 
"When this is lost, no matter in what stage of our 
being, whether in this life or another, we feel our 
weakness, we seem to lie at the mercy of change, 
and to hang over the abysses of annihilation. 

And how mysterious are the shapes in which the 
spoiler appears! He comes not like an angel of 
peace, but seizes his victim as his prey. He comes 
in a grisly train of diseases and sufferings, the seeds 
of which the infant brings with him into the world. 
Yes, the infant that never knew sin has the tender 
fibres of his frame torn by the destroyer, and the 
death-agonies are received with the very boon of ex- 
istence. Womanhood fades away in its beautiful 
prime, before its swift day has " run to the even- 
song," and manhood fails amid the heat and burden 
of the noontide hour, and the impress of suffering is 
left upon its glorious brow. Not one fourth of the 
race attain to the period of natural decay. One 
half, it is computed, die during the periods of infan- 
cy and childhood. 

Can it be said that a human nature which has all 
this inheritance of disease, suffering, and mortality, 
has the soundness of its primal state, and that no 
taint has fallen upon it? We do not argue that 
mortality is the effect of sin, nor do we believe that 
the primitive man would never have died if he had 
never transgressed. But we do argue that death 
could never become this monster in the universe, 
could never make this train of diseases and agonies 
the grim heralds of his presence, could never make 



THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 49 

the human frame a rack of torture and turn its vital 
streams into currents of fire, unless something had 
perverted the fundamental laws of our being. We 
are surely treading here amid the ruins of a disor- 
dered and a broken nature. There is nothing in the 
fact of mortal change, which is merely outward and 
phenomenal, the flux and reflux of being on its 
course to the highest development of life, — there is 
nothing in this fact that it should be draperied about 
with mourning in our homes and churches. We 
look out at this moment into the natural world, and 
we there see the processes of death going on under 
very different conditions. There is something sooth- 
ing beyond description, when nature puts on her 
death-robes, something which disposes to calm and 
holy musings. How peacefully does it come over 
the landscape, and what brilliancy does it fling upon 
the woods of autumn ! And as we look along the 
western horizon, where " parting day dies like a dol- 
phin " whom every ebb of life imbues with a fresh 
glory, what a contrast have we in the aspect with 
which it comes to nature and to man ! We do not 
put these analogies in an argumentative way, any 
farther than to suggest what death might be, and 
what it would be to an untainted human nature. 
This flesh which we wear is the foliage of an unseen 
and an immortal life, and there is no reason why it 
should not fall away in its season, still and peaceful 
as autumn leaves, that this interior life may flower 
forth anew in the glories of unending spring. There 
is no reason why it should not steal on the decay- 



50 THE NATURAL MAN. 

ing senses without a pang, so that while the mortal 
fades away, the immortal appears, one waxing as 
the other is waning, every entrance into the spirit- 
world being with a train of light lingering on the 
mind, sweet and mellow as that which rests on the 
hills at eventide. 

But two things there are which barb the sting of 
death. There is this inheritance of disease that we 
speak of, — of organizations with broken laws and 
the earnest of swift decay. Hence death is not the 
unclothing of the spirit, but the rending away of its 
garment by violence. But more than this ; man be- 
comes buried in sense and matter, and this world be- 
comes all in all. This world is the substance, while 
the spirit-world is the shadow. This is real, while 
that is spectral. Therefore to leave the solid earth 
is to tread away into nothing, and drop into the cold 
depths of the night, while on the ear from all that 
are loved and loving are falling everlasting farewells. 
On account of this seeming annihilation, nature 
sends up a deep and bitter cry. Or perhaps one 
sees before him the shadow-land which tradition has 
peopled with terrors, and where only phantoms are 
gliding past. 

To a human nature in the freshness and purity of 
its morning prime, when celestial beings stood on 
the confines of both worlds and sang " strains suita- 
ble for both," the eye of faith would be open and 
clear; the spirit-realm would be the substance, while 
this would be the shadow; from infancy to age hu- 
man beings would live in conscious fellowship with 



THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 51 

the sweet societies of the blest ; death would come 
in his season, not to tear them away, but to lift a 
veil from their eyes, and disclose to them that sphere 
which already had sent its peace into their hearts 
and left its brightness on their souls. 






CHAPTER VII. 

THE "ADAM" OF ST. PAUL. 

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, has a passage 
which has figured largely in our theologies, and on 
account of its deep philosophical import we will cite 
it at length, in as literal a rendering as it will bear. 

" Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the 
world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon 
all men, for that all have sinned. — (For until the 
law, sin was in the world. But sin is not imputed 
where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned 
from Adam to Moses, even over those that had not 
sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression, who 
is the type of him that was to come. Yet the free 
gift again is not so as is the offence. For if through 
the offence of one the many be dead, much more the 
grace of God, and the gift which is through the grace 
of one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded to the 
many. Neither is the gift so as it was by one who 
sinned. For the judgment was of one offence to 
condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences 
to justification. For if by the offence of one, death 
reigned by one, much more they who receive the 
abounding grace and gift of justification shall reign 



THE "ADAM" OF ST. PAUL. 53 

in life by one Jesus Christ.) — Therefore, as by the 
offence of one judgment came upon all men unto 
condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one 
the gift came upon all men to justification of life. 
For as by one man's disobedience the many were 
made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall the 
many be made righteous. Moreover, the law entered 
that the offence might abound. But where sin 
abounded, grace did superabound ; that as sin hath 
reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through 
righteousness, unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ 
our Lord." 

The Apostle's style is so exceedingly concise, that 
we must paraphrase his language a little in order to 
make it clear. He is arguing with a supposed Jew- 
ish objector; his style is interlocutory, and if the 
ellipses were supplied, his argument would proceed 
thus : — 

OBJECTOR. 

The blessings of the true religion are the peculiar 
inheritance of the seed of Abraham, and in the 
keeping of the Jewish Church ; how, then, can Chris- 
tianity be true, which breaks down sacred distinc- 
tions, and takes every body into its favor ? 

PAUL. 

I reply to that, that a true religion has for its ob- 
ject to bring a remedy for sin and make men holy, 
and the remedy must be coextensive with the evil. 
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world, and 

5* 



54 THE NATURAL MAN. 

death by sin, and so death hath passed upon all 
men, for that all have sinned. As sin was in the 
world before the Jewish law, so, therefore 

OBJECTOR. 

Pause. Sin is not imputed where there is no 
law. How can there be transgression where there 
is no command to be transgressed ? 

PAUL. 

By the admission of your own Rabbins, death is 
the effect of sin. But does nobody die but Jews ? 
Were men immortal till the Jewish law was given ? 
Death did reign from Adam to Moses, even over 
those who had not, like Adam, transgressed any posi- 
tive command. And this Adam represents the Mes- 
siah in a most important particular, — that the uni- 
versality of the evil brought in by the one corre- 
sponds to the universality of the blessing offered by 
the other. Yea, the blessing transcends the evil, 
and in that respect they are unlike. For if through 
the offence of one the many be dead, much more 
the grace of God and the gift which is through the 
grace of one man, Jesus Christ, have abounded to the 
many. The grace not only remedies the evil, but 
gives a surplus of blessing beside. And in another 
respect the gift is not like the bane. For the judg- 
ment came through one offence to condemnation, 
but the free gift is of many offences to justification. 
The pardon is offered, not only to that one sin of 
Adam, but to all the sins that followed after. For if 



TEE " ADAM " OF ST. PAUL. 55 

by the offence of one, death reigned by one, much 
more they who receive the abounding grace and gift 
of justification shall reign in life by one, Jesus 
Christ. Therefore, as I was first saying, as by the 
offence of one, judgment came upon all men unto 
condemnation, so, since the remedy is coextensive 
with it, the free-given gospel comes to all men 
unto justification of life. For as by one man's 
disobedience the many were made sinners, so by 
the obedience of one shall the many be made 
righteous. 

OBJECTOR. 

Admitting all you say, what need of the gospel ? 
Make the law universal, for that makes men right- 
eous. 

PAUL. 

Just the contrary ! The effect of the law was that 
sin abounded more, for it revealed a perfect rule, but 
did not supply the grace to bring men up to its re- 
quirements. Not so of the gospel, for under that, 
where sin abounds, grace doth superabound; that 
as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might 
grace reign, through righteousness, unto eternal life, 
through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

1. In what way physical death entered the world 
by sin, will be quite evident from the way that 
Christianity proposes to abolish it. The evil will 
be apparent from the nature of the remedy; the state 



56 THE NATURAL MAN. 

from which man fell, from the state to which he is 
to be restored. Christianity does not propose to do 
away the fact of man's transition from the natural 
to the spiritual world, but rather to do away with 
all the death-like environments which it now has. 
Those being removed, death is growth ; the growth 
of man into the angel, amid the falling away of the 
hindrances and clogs of the inmost, the immortal 
life. It proposes to restore his nature to its primal 
order, to bring a fair and goodly creation out of its 
chaos, and then the inclosed immortal will break 
away from its integuments, not by the agencies 
of disease, but of superabundant life unfolding 
from within outward, casting off the natural body 
and assuming the spiritual, just as the covering of 
the worm falls away that the insect may rise with 
spangled wings into the air. This is not death, 
but health and life for ever enlarging. So that the 
death which Adam introduced was not the fact of 
human mortality, but the dismal drapery thrown 
about it. 

2. It is obvious to observe, on a careful analysis of 
the Pauline philosophy, how much more than his 
proper share of the evil brought upon the world, our 
common ancestor has been made to bear. Was 
ever the memory of man so wronged and abused by 
his children ! So far from laying off upon him the 
whole business of man's fall, Paul does no more 
than designate how the work began, and how sin 
was first introduced. His successors kept adding to 
the work which he only commenced, and death 



THE "ADAM" OF ST. PAUL. 57 

passed upon all men, not because Adam sinned for 
them vicariously, but in that all have sinned. He 
sinned, and there, alas ! began the work of the deg- 
radation of his species; the balance between good 
and evil began to dip the wrong way, his successors 
kept adding to the weight, sin became more facile 
with every generation, till the scale came heavily 
down. And this is the Fall of Man. 

3. Hence the Adam of St. Paul is not merely an 
historical person. He is only so treated in the fore- 
going extract, in order to keep up the antithesis 
between him and Christ. Not so when he applies 
his doctrine and appeals to individual experience! 
There it is the Adam of consciousness. It is the 
" old man," which is to be " crucified " within us, or 
which is to be put off as corrupt, in contrast with 
the new man, which is the ingenerated and indwell- 
ing Christ.* So then the Adam of St. Paul in this 
connection is a corrupt past, which has become im- 
manent in the present. It is an inherited, disordered 
nature, impersonated in each individual. With 
primitive man began the descending series, and it 
kept on till the time of Christ. Then the ascending 
series began, and it will keep on till it comes up to 
the level of that height where began the march of 
humanity. Or to seek an image which perhaps will 
give us at once the Apostle's unclouded meaning : 
He regards the race in its totality, as an organic 
whole, as making one orb of being. With the first 

* Eora. vi. 6 ; Eph. iv. 22 ; Col. iii. 9. 



58 



THE NATURAL MAN. 



man's sin it began to dip into darkness, and the line 
of shade encroached upon it till it hung in disastrous 
eclipse. With Christ its emergence began, and it 
will continue till it rolls in complete glory along the 
latest ages. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE LAW OF DESCENT BENEFICENT. 



" No one generation linking with the other, men would become little better than 
the flies of a summer." — Burke. 



We suppose our argument will not be regarded as 
complete, unless we vindicate the justice and benefi- 
cence of the law of human descent, which we have 
endeavored to illustrate in the preceding pages. It 
will be said, that it does not comport with our no- 
tions of a just creator thus to burden his children 
with hereditary evil; that, after all, it is punishing 
the sons for the crimes of their ancestors, and is 
thus open to the objections to which the old dogma 
of original sin lies exposed. 

A first and obvious answer to all such reasoning 
is, that the objection is merely theoretic. It argues 
from our notions of God to what we think the facts 
ought to be, and thus sets at naught the first princi- 
ples of induction. Better accept the facts as they 
are, as they lie all about us and within us. The 
problem of ages has been to reconcile the existence 
of evil with the Divine attributes ; and evil that 
comes by transmission is no more irreconcilable 
with those attributes, than the evil that forms the 



60 THE NATURAL MAN. 

sharp environment of our condition and crushes 
us from without. Perhaps the evil that is transmis- 
sive and comes from within is more consistent with 
our notions of the Divine mercy, since it is more 
subject to our personal volition and control. Be that 
as it may, it is our wisdom to learn our state pre- 
cisely as it is, to know all the difficulties that beset 
us, and then we shall turn with more enlightened 
vision to the means of our deliverance. 

But we go further than all this. We vindicate 
the law of transmissive qualities and proclivities as 
essential to the permanence and the very existence 
of society. Unless the peculiar genius and disposi- 
tions of parents were produced anew in their descend- 
ants, through successive generations, what would 
humanity present but a mass of heterogeneous and 
discordant atoms ? Societies, states, and nations 
could not be formed out of them and perpetuated. 
Society is the collective man, having a unity of its 
own, existing not only in a given locality, but 
through indefinite periods of time ; having, like the 
individual, a development of its powers from youth 
to maturity and age ; having a work to do on the 
earth ; having schemes of improvement to be formed 
and matured through a series of generations. In 
order to this, the peculiar loves, tastes, and aptitudes 
of the fathers must ever be produced anew; the 
past must ever live in the present ; the spirit of an- 
cestry must go down in unbroken line to a remote 
posterity. The children cherish the memory of the 
fathers, inherit their life, and take up the work they 



THE LAW OF DESCENT BENEFICENT. 61 

left to make it over in turn to a new generation. 
Thus, while the individual is weak, society is strong. 
The individual is ephemeral, but society is immortal. 
The individual can do comparatively nothing ; soci- 
ety accomplishes works of skill and grandeur which 
are the wonder and the charm of ages. But suppose 
this law of descent were abolished. Let the fathers 
have no guaranty that they shall live again in the 
children. Let every man come into being with the 
thread of history cut from behind him, commencing 
an existence original and de novo, without the pecu- 
liar loves and aptitudes of his ancestry or his tribe, 
and society at once is resolved into a wretched indi- 
vidualism, with which all progress must stop for ever; 
and all the accumulations of past wisdom and expe- 
rience must be lost in a hopeless and endless chaos. 
Suppose, for instance, the transmitted tastes and ten- 
dencies of the Pilgrim were to cease with the pres- 
ent generation in New England, and the next gener- 
ation were to come upon the stage, not with the in- 
born conatus of ancestry, but each individual with 
his own original proclivities, like Frenchmen, China- 
men, or promiscuously what you please. The past 
two hundred years would be lost to the future, and 
the land would sink, as by a stroke, into primitive 
barbarism. Laws would only be formed for the ex- 
igencies of the present hour. Or rather, since laws 
are the collective will of a homogeneous population, 
law and statesmanship would cease alike for ever. 

The law of descent in its beneficent operations 
is the grand principle of organization by which hu- 



62 THE NATURAL MAN. 

manity rises out of barbarism into its loveliest forms 
of life and beauty. Around this are formed, first 
families, then states and empires, then races, then a 
humanity full and complete, organism within or- 
ganism, with all their interdependences and inter- 
actions, each homogeneous in itself, and operating 
for the good of all, forming together a human race 
that develops all the forces of human nature, and 
reflects in every possible way the charms and glo- 
ries of the Divine. Such may it one day become. 
And the law of descent is an ever-recurring security 
that society shall not be subject to violent and de- 
structive changes. Like the individual, its improve- 
ment and renovation shall not break up the continu- 
ity of its being. Even if it be on a course of de- 
terioration, it shall decline and be dissolved with the 
least possible of individual suffering and ruin. But 
let that law cease by which generation links to 
generation, without which there is no hearty love 
and reverence of ancestry, without which the fa- 
thers cannot live in the future nor the children in 
the past, and society, if it could exist at all, would 
be always in a whirl of revolution. Every reform 
would be a destruction and a re-creation out of ruin, 
if, indeed, there could be enough of elective afnnity 
among the chaotic atoms for any reconstruction to 
become possible. Every important change would be 
by dissolving the fabric into " the dust and powder 
of individuality." 

The law, then, by which dispositions, good or bad, 
become transmissive, is a wise and beneficent law, 



THE LAW OF DESCENT BENEFICENT. 63 

essential to the existence of the collective and social 
man. But, like all the laws of creation and provi- 
dence, it has necessarily a twofold operation. On 
pure and holy natures it produces ever new accu- 
mulations of blessing. On natures whose laws are 
perverted, it produces suffering ; but the suffering is 
necessary and incidental, to be controlled and over- 
ruled for abounding good to those who seek to be 
benefited thereby. The same providence seeks our 
final happiness and regeneration alike in the evil that 
lies around us and in the evil that follows us from 
behind. Whether circumjacent or hereditary, it is 
subject to that law of optimism which seeks the 
highest good of the universe and of every individ- 
ual that lives within it. It may be demanded, per- 
haps, Why is not the good transmissive without the 
evil ? As if the evil stood apart in tangible shape, 
without interblending with our whole being, and 
entering essentially into the complexion of all that 
we call character. There is no man who is one half 
good and the other half bad. The good and the evil 
modify and interpenetrate each other in endless com- 
binations, and if one is transmitted, the other must 
be. The law of progression and the law of deterio- 
ration are one and the same principle operating 
under different conditions. That man is wise, who, 
untrammelled by baseless theories, how much soev- 
er they may please his fancies, shall rightly appre- 
hend his own interior state, and shall be so trained 
and disciplined, both by the evil within and the evil 
without, that he shall be among that number at last 



64 THE NATURAL MAN. 

who come out of great tribulation, with robes 
" washed white in the blood of the Lamb." 



We rest here in the third general theory of man 
which we announced, — that transmitted dispositions 
and proclivities to evil, coming down a line of tainted 
ancestry, and gathering strength and volume the far- 
ther they descend, is a universal law of human de- 
scent. Objections, doubtless, may still be raised, such 
as that every soul is a fresh creation of God, and is 
therefore pure. Or, again, that the tide of corruption 
that comes from behind us and sweeps us away, de- 
stroys our moral responsibility. The first objection 
we do not think it worth while to entertain. It is 
fanciful and vague, and reasons not from facts that 
we know, but claims to set those facts aside from 
some imaginary psychology. To the other objection 
we are sufficiently sensitive, and we grant that it 
might be valid if the foregoing argument claimed to 
give the whole account of man. But it does not : 
and this objection will disappear in the light of any 
rational and faithful delineation of man's spiritual 
nature and capacities. We have described the dis- 
ease, for it behooves us to know the worst, though 
it lead us among ruins that are mournful. We turn 
now to views that are auspicious and cheering. 



PART II 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 



There is in heaven a light whose goodly shine 

Makes the Creator visible to all 

Created, that in seeing him alone 

Have peace ; and in its circuit spreads so far, 

That the circumference, with enlarging zone, 

Doth girdle in the worlds." — Cart's Dante. 

" The speech op God which produces the works of creation is that 
immutable Eeason from which they flow, and by which they are per- 
fected, — not an evanescent voice merely, but a living energy, reaching 
to the farthest extremities of nature and the most distant ages. In this 
manner God speaks to his holy angels, but to them audibly : to us oth- 
erwise, on account of our grosser apprehension. But when we perceive 
through our internal ears some faint notices of this Divine Speech, we 
approach the angels." —Augustine, De Civ. Dei, Lib. XVI. cap. 6. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE HOLY SPIRIT. 



" That which we find in ourselves is the substance and the life of all our knowledge. 
Without this latent presence of the I Am, all modes of existence in the external world 
would flit before us as colored shadows, with no greater depth, root, or fixture than 
the image of the rock hath in a gliding stream, or the rainbow in a fast-sailing rain- 
storm. The human mind is the compass, in which the laws and actuations of all 
outward essences are revealed as the dips and declinations." — Coleridge. 



The spiritual nature implies two things. A spir- 
itual world which exists out of man, and a faculty 
in him to put him in connection with that world, and 
apprehend its objects. It implies the adaptation of 
one to the other. The physical nature includes the 
faculties of sensation : but the faculties of sensation 
imply their objects, — the world of sights and sounds 
and fragrance ; of skies, fields, and waters ; a world 
which puts the physical nature in connection with 
itself, and unfolds all the sensuous powers. Even so 
there is the same correlative fitness of the spiritual 
man to a spiritual world, or else the term spiritual 
nature, as applied to human beings, would be a term 
without a meaning. 

Let us now approach the subject of the Divine 
nature so far forth as to deduce the doctrine of Di- 
vine influence. There are two sources of evidence 



68 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

that lie open to us whereby this doctrine may come 
clear and living to our minds. There is a sure and 
safe analogy, and there are the vivid descriptions 
of revelation. 

Man is created in the image of God, and so in 
man the Creator has abridged and copied ouiT his 
own attributes. Were it not so, we could have no 
communion with the Eternal Father, any more than 
the beasts of the field or the clods of the valley. We 
could not even form any conception of the Divine 
nature, for we could get no ideas answering to the 
terms which describe it, and God would be unrevealed 
in the human and finite images which set him 
forth. For instance, if there be a trinity in God, there 
would also be a trinity in man, that likeness which a 
pencil of rays out of his own nature has made of 
itself and projected into time. And just so far as it 
fails of realization in the likeness and the copy will 
the words that describe it be words and nothing 
more. And so of the Holy Spirit. In man must we 
find the analogy that sets forth its nature, else the 
terms that describe it will be sounds that float idle 
upon the air. 

We describe the human being from two points of 
view; — man as he is, and man as he is manifested in 
his doings; — man in his own person, and man in the 
spirit that is breathed out of it; in his intrinsic nature 
and in its daily and hourly outgoings; in his essen- 
tial being, and in the functions it performs in the 
economy of life ; in the powers that lie within him, 
and in the influence that goes out of him, and creates 



THE HOLY SPIRIT. 69 

the moral atmosphere, the insphering life that affects 
all things that lie within it. There are those whose 
persons we have never looked upon, but whose influ- 
ence abides with us, transforming our characters, and 
permeating all our trains of thought and feeling 
when least we are thinking about it. Indeed, man in 
his finite degree may be said to create a world out of 
himself. He is furnished with the rough material, 
the primal chaos, so to say, which he acts upon and 
transfigures by his own effusive energies. Nature 
and society furnish the material which he works with 
plastic power, and he leaves on them the prints of his 
genius, and imbues them with the colorings of his 
mind. According to what he is, is the quality and 
amount of the virtue that goes out of him, and he 
cannot cease to impart his peculiar life unless he 
sinks into the lethargy of death. His hand, feeble 
though it be, holds the " golden compasses " of the 
poet, by which he marks off a portion of the chaos 
that lies about him ; and this circumference is filled, 
and to some extent is changed, by that life that never 
ceases to go out of him. Some modern philosophers 
would have us believe that its manifestations are 
more subtile than ordinary senses have ever detect- 
ed, and that all things about him, when least he is 
conscious of it, are imbued and imprinted with his 
genius. 

Indeed, this same distinction holds of all created 
things, — things as they exist in their own form and 
essence, and as they impart their virtue and perform 
their use in the grand economy, from the modest 



70 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

flower that rises by the way-side and exhales its 
sweetness on the ambient air, to the sun out of 
whose orb come the never-ceasing waves of glory 
that break on the outermost limits of the universe. 
Not a tree nor a leaf — no, not a clod nor a stone — 
out of which virtue of some kind is not always go- 
ing. Not a substance which has not its attractive 
or repellent forces, and which does not impart ei- 
ther health or poison. Could we see into the life 
of things, we should know how they act and react 
upon each other in such wise as to elude our clumsy 
analysis, and that that grandest conception of the 
imagination had hardly outrun the sober train of 
philosophy, — 

" There 's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st 
But in its motion like an angel sings, 
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins ; 
But while this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it." 

Ascend we now to the august conception of the 
Holy Spirit of God. The Divine Being exists in 
one infinite and glorious person, but out of that per- 
son comes the life that pervades the universe, and 
constitutes the latent principle out of which nil other 
forms of life do blossom forth. It is the effluent en- 
ergy that creates all souls in its own image, and 
which by never-ceasing effusions would make them 
beautify and grow towards its own perfections. 
Falling into mute and insensate natures, they are 
only moulded into the passive and unconscious 
images of the Divine wisdom, beneficence, and 



THE HOLY SPIRIT. 71 

beauty. But falling into the natures of free and ra- 
tional agents, and freely and rationally received, it- 
produces love, wisdom, holiness, making man the 
active and conscious likeness of the supremely Good 
and Fair. Hence man returns the love he receives, 
and hence his communion with God. Free and 
spiritual beings may receive this influence in more 
fall or more feeble measures, and so among them are 
all gradations of spiritual life. The sensual and the 
sinful grieve and quench the spirit. But it is received 
in more beatific measures among the inner ranks 
of saint and angel, and yet more by those inmost 
ranks that do always behold the face of the Fa- 
ther, — 

" The circles in the circles that approach 
The central sun with ever narrowing orbit." 

Conceiving the true doctrine of Divine influence 
to be of primary importance, we must ask the reader 
now to put this conception of the Holy Spirit in 
contrast with some other views, that it may stand out 
with due prominence. We put it in contrast with 
the idea that the Divinity is an impersonal spirit that 
pervades humanity, or a blind unconscious force that 
rolls through nature. The idea of God is not to be 
confounded with that of the spirit which he sheds 
abroad. We know of no spiritual influence which 
is not the outbreathing life of a living person. We 
know of no spiritual power which is not the attribute 
of a conscious being. Out of man and above man, 
out of nature and above nature, is the Divine Person, 
around whom centre all the splendors of the God- 



72 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

head, but from whom is that effluence of light 
and love which pervades the whole circuit of being, 
and makes every atom glow with his omnipresence. 
" Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord." 

Again, we put it in contrast with that abortion of 
the human intellect, the personality of the Holy 
Spirit, as we have not a doubt that this latter is the 
source of much that is anomalous in the prevailing 
modes of spiritual nurture. For if the Holy Spirit is 
a person that comes and goes between man and 
God, his advent will be hailed by tumults of rapture, 
his departure and absence will be bewailed as the era 
of desolation and mourning, his return will be sought 
by mystic rites and agonizing conjurations ; the wil- 
dering fancy will see the signs of his return in its own 
wandering lights and irregular frames ; the favored 
families which he visits will be pointed out, and the 
families which have been " passed over " will seem 
abandoned to perdition. The churches will increase 
rather by periodic agglomerations than by homo- 
geneous and perennial growth. There will be the 
alternation of chills and fevers, not the conscious- 
ness of God's abiding spirit, always given, always 
immanent, and whose life is ever to be unfolded in 
the crowning virtues and graces of the Christian 
character. 

r- 



CHAPTER II. 
ITS GENERAL AND SPECIAL INFLUENCE. 

" But when he came the second time, 

He came with power and love ; 
Softer than gale at morning prime 

Hovered the Holy Dove. 
The fires that rushed from Sinai down 

In trembling torrents dread, 
Now gently light, a glorious crown, 

On every sainted head." — Keble. 

The declarations of Scripture which describe God 
as acting upon man and working in man, naturally 
arrange themselves into two general classes. In the 
first place, they set forth the doctrine most distinctly 
and unequivocally, that God works in all men ; that 
his is that universal and incumbent spirit by which 
all minds, whether Christian or heathen, discern a 
power above and within themselves, an everlasting 
law that lies upon them and seeks its realization in 
all their voluntary actions. This eternal spirit, 
whether transfused through nature and making all 
sensible things to copy out the eternal mind, or 
whether coming directly from within, has the same 
end, to woo the human spirit to itself. Paul places 
both Jew and gentile alike under condemnation, not 
only because the eternal power and Godhead had 



74 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

been revealed to the gentiles in visible things, but 
because he had been revealed in their own conscien- 
ces and had written his law upon their inmost 
hearts.* And the same truth is brought out with 
amazing prominence in the steps of that divine 
argument comprised in the first fourteen verses of 
John's Gospel. That same Divine Word by which 
all things were made, and by which therefore visible 
things became the expression of God's mind, or, in 
Platonic phrase, the pictures of GocVs ideas, — this 
Word also came to man and shone amid the thick- 
folding darkness of his soul. " In him was life, and 
the life was the light of man, and the light shineth 
in darkness, but the darkness comprehendeth it not." 
It was that life enshrined in the inmost of humanity, 
and always in effort to shoot up its light into the 
human consciousness and bring man's life into, har- 
mony with itself. And because obstructed by those 
folds of sin and error which generation after genera- 
tion had laid around it, this Divine Word became 
incarnate in Jesus Christ ; God was manifest in the 
flesh, that the nations might behold his glory, since 
that glory was waning to its extinction in the soul. 

" It is God which worketh in you both to will and 
to do of his good pleasure." f That man has the 
power of originating truth and goodness is one of the 
illusions of his own pride. His mind is not a ma- 
chine, created and set agoing, to work out its results 
independent of its Framer. Rather is it an organ- 

* Eom. ii. 15. t Phil. ii. 13. 



ITS GENERAL AND SPECIAL INFLUENCE. 75 

ism for the reception of light and life in perennial 
streams from the Eternal Fountain, and by that life 
to grow for ever into a brighter image of God. Man 
is made such an organism by the very constitution 
of his spiritual being, and he cannot cease to be such 
unless he ceases to be human, and falls away from 
his species. It is on this sure ground that the Scrip- 
tures place the doctrine of human responsibility, in 
regard to those people who have received no special 
revelation. Even the material world would have 
been to the gentiles no revelation of the eternal pow- 
er and Godhead, unless that same power which 
spread abroad its scenery had imparted his informing 
and imbreathing spirit to interpret its signs. So, 
then, every form in which humanity can possibly 
appear is an organism adapted to receive into its in- 
most nature this effluent life of God,* just as in the 
natural world every thing that grows, from the daffo- 
dil to the cedar of Lebanon, is flooded by the light 
and heat of the sun, by which the vital juices are 
kept in motion, and out of which are woven the col- 
ors of woods and fields. All the spiritual graces 
which man puts on through the thousand shades of 
character, both Christian and heathen, are in like 
manner from the life of God received within and 
thence blooming outward upon the world. As soon 
as he receives existence, he receives along with it 
intellectual and affectional powers, one to receive 
truth and be formed thereby into the image of the 
Divine reason, the other to be kindled and guided by 
it and be formed thereby into the image of eternal 



76 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

lov 2. There is no mind, moreover, into which hath 
not dawned the great idea of right and wrong, and 
that quivering sense of justice in all men which they 
call conscience, and which the Apostle says made 
the heathen a law unto themselves, is formed by the 
gentle and never-ceasing undulations of the Holy 
Spirit through the heart. Man lives in two worlds 
at the same time, one of matter and one of spirit* 
Not more surely do the external senses open outward 
and downward, and put him in communication with 
material things, than a finer sense opens inward and 
upward, through which come the idea of God and 
tidings of immortality. Not more surely do his sen- 
suous faculties bring into his ear the sound of waters, 
and over his brow the breath of breezes, than his spir- 
itual faculties admit to his soul the aura of heaven 
and the still and awful beatings from the heart of 
God. " What nation or race of men can be found," 
asks a heathen writer whose pages are more alive 
with spiritual ideas than much of our Christian lit- 
erature, — " what nation or race of men can be found, 
which have not without any teaching some precon- 
ceptions of Deity, some idea of the subject by which 
the mind is preoccupied, and without which there 
could be no questions and reasonings about it ? 
There must be divinities, for we have thoughts of 
them which are inseminated and inborn." * So he 
will have it that the primal truths are not the discov- 
eries of man's painful logic, but they roll in upon 

* Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I. 16, 17. 



ITS GENERAL AND SPECIAL INFLUENCE. 77 

him from the all-informing Intelligence, and to per- 
ceive them he has but to listen and to pause. At 
any rate, we are shut in to one of two alternatives. 
We must assume that all the disinterested virtues, 
all godlike sentiment, and the ideas of God and im- 
mortality and the divine law, which are found out- 
side of Christendom, are what man has evolved out 
of his own reason, independent of divine aid, and 
so he can be wise and good of himself, or else we 
assume that God is never without a witness in the 
hearts of all his rational creatures, and that the Eter- 
nal "Word is the true light that enlighteneth every 
man that cometh into the world. We take the lat- 
ter alternative, in company, as we think, with the 
Evangelist and the Apostle, and we say, as Erasmus 
did after reading Cicero on duty and immortality, 
" I am so affected that I cannot doubt that the breast 
whence such things proceeded was in some way oc- 
cupied by the Divinity." 

But while the New Testament writers assert this 
immanence of God's spirit in man, they use the 
words Holy Spirit in a more restricted sense, and 
as describing a special influence. The Saviour, on 
the eve of withdrawing his personal presence from 
his disciples, gave promise that he would send the 
Comforter, the spirit of truth, to guide them into all 
truth and bring all his teachings to their remem- 
brance. Up to the hour of his ascension, they were 
ignorant of the nature of his kingdom, and the truths 
of Christianity lay dead in their memories. But af- 
ter ten days had passed away, and while they were 



78 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

assembled at Jerusalem in expectation of some new 
tokens from on high, the promised influence came. 
God's spirit swept through their souls like rushing 
breezes ; the truths that lie dead in their memories 
are blown into flame, their powers of utterance are 
unloosed, and such is the new light within that it 
seems to play around their persons like lambent 
fire.* This was the commencement of a new dis- 
pensation of the spirit, which ever since has been en- 
joyed by the Christian Church just so far as she has 
observed the condition of its reception. Yes, it was 
the great purpose of Christ in coming into the world 
to prepare the way for this new advent of the Divinity 
in the human soul. It was to remove all obstacles 
in the way of God's access to humanity, that he, 
who is always coming, might be always received. 

Now it is important to observe, that this new di- 
vine influence differs in degree, though not in kind, 
from the universal action of God in man before de- 
scribed. Ever and everywhere the hindrance to this 
action is the sin and the ignorance of man, the dark 
and baleful cloud formed from exhalations out of 
his own heart, and hanging between him and the 
Divine glory. But for this, God would inundate our 
souls every hour with the warmth and the splendors 
of noon. Precisely here was the consummation of the 
mission of Christ. He came first with a dispensa- 
tion of truth, and the dispensation of the spirit was 
the necessary consummation. He penetrated the 

* Compare John xx. 26 with Acts ii. 



ITS GENERAL AND SPECIAL INFLUENCE. 79 

darkness that brooded over the mind, and God shone 
without hindrance into it. And so the Church in the 
day of its purity appeared in an age of darkness, 
like one of those refulgent spots which lie upon the 
landscape under a riven cloud, and which on either 
side are flanked by the shadows flung from its 
-rings. 

All those passages of Scripture which describe the 
operations of the Divine Spirit, whether as a general 
dispensation to human nature, or a special dispensa- 
tion to the Christian Church, are in strict harmony 
with the deductions of analogy. True, there are 
passages in which it is personified, but it is personi- 
fied in just the same way as is every attribute of 
God, — his Word and his Wisdom, his Mercy and 
Truth, his Righteousness and Peace.* In its opera- 
tion, it is always represented as the effluent life of 
God. Take its current phraseology, being " filled 
with the Holy Ghost, " " baptized with the Holy 
Spirit," and try to annex the idea of a person, and 
the understanding is overwhelmed with confusion. 
Take the whole Pentecostal scene, where the spirit 
descended into the minds of the Apostles, and ap- 
peared around them like the play of nimble light- 
nings, conceive of it as a person, and your concep- 
tion becomes perplexing and monstrous. But think 
of it as an influence from the one Infinite Person, 
which imbathed their souls with its tidal fragrance 
and light, and all is clear and rational, and in close 
accordance with the facts of Scripture and analogy. 

* Ps. lxxxv. 10. 



80 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

The new dispensation of the Holy Ghost, intro- 
duced through the mediation of Jesus Christ, is a 
topic to which we shall return when treating of the 
means of regeneration. What we now observe is> 
that it is the same Holy Spirit, the effluent life of 
God, of which" all nations and ages have had some 
perception and experience. But by the mediation 
of Christ, it was made more operative in human re- 
demption. Both the general influence and its spe- 
cial adaptations to the human condition imply a 
nature in man receptive of the gift. 



CHAPTER III. 

SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE. 

" Of that innumerable company 

Who in broad circles, lovelier than the rainbow, 

Girdle this round earth with a dizzy motion, 

With noise too vast and constant to be heard, — 

Fitliest unheard ! For, ye numberless 

And rapid travellers ! what ear unstunned, 

What sense unmaddened, might bear up against 

The rushing of your congregated wings ! " — Coleridge. 

The Christian believes that after the event of 
death he shall be transferred to a sphere of spiritu- 
al being, and be surrounded by the denizens of an- 
other world. But what if we are already in it! 
What if already we are environed by its " number- 
less and rapid travellers " ! This veil of flesh that 
hangs about us is designed not more to reveal God 
to us, than to attemper and soften to us his intenser 
brightness ; — to hide the stupendous agencies by 
which he sways us, and to muffle the noise of their 
footsteps, because our ears could not bear the too 
solemn sounds, nor our eyes gaze on the too beauti- 
ful sight! 

Man, in the great plan of providence, is not trans- 
ferred from one sphere of being into another. 
Rather is he brought into conscious relations to a 



82 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

higher and yet higher sphere, by the successive de- 
velopment of his original powers. The infant, first 
introduced into this world of sense, scarcely sees its 
varied forms of art and nature. All is a blank, or 
all is confusion ; but he has within him a faculty 
which gradually unfolds and comes into exercise, 
and then what new and endless prospects open 
around him ! The man blind from his birth has 
seemed to himself to live only in a very narrow 
sphere, through which he groped painfully, breathing 
the fragrance of fields and bathing in the warm 
sunlight, yet seeing not the objects whence they 
come. Some skilful hand touches the undeveloped 
faculty and removes its obstructions, and lo! with- 
out any transfer, he lives in a new world, that floods 
his soul with grandeur and beauty. He has not 
been carried into it, for it lay all about him before, 
and poured its influence upon him ; but now for the 
first time his developed powers have brought him 
into open relations with it. Nor can we say how 
far this might still go on. Not one half of the glo- 
ry and excellency even of this visible sphere has ever 
yet revealed itself to our dull senses, and agencies 
too refined and subtile for our detection are every 
moment playing around us and through us. Were 
our perceptions sufficiently quickened, or new per- 
ceptions given us, what a new world of wonders 
would open upon us, even where now we stand, 
transcending all our imaginations and dreams ! 

Even so the spiritual world is not a realm far off 
in space, into which we shall be introduced by the 



SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE. 83 

event of death. Rather is it that order of being of 
which we are to have cognizance by the powers 
that already wait within us, and death will not so 
much remove us, as remove from us the obstructions 
that closed us in from its unseen illuminations. 

We read that sometimes in the plan of Divine 
Providence this inner sense, which ordinarily is not 
brought into exercise until that moment when the 
spirit is dissevered from the swathings of the flesh, 
is for special reasons opened before that time, giving 
to the prophet cognizance of those schemes and 
orders of being which surround him. The patriarch 
lay down to rest, and while his external senses were 
closed, this inward eye was unsealed and opened 
wide, and lo ! the vast agencies are revealed to him, 
rank above rank, that " move up and down ©n heav- 
enly ministries." The prophet is called to his solemn 
office while the coverings of sense are rolled away, 
giving him gleams of that sublime ritual by which 
the heavenly hosts waft praises to the Creator. The 
three favored disciples withdrew with their Master 
to the stillness of the mount, and there saw him 
as he appeared within the concealments of flesh and 
blood, holding converse with the glorified prophets. 
The Saviour passes from the scene of temptation to 
the scene of victory, beset in the one by the tempt- 
ing fiends, and encircled in the other by the minis- 
tering angels. The great Apostle is for a time freed 
from the clogs of the body, and sees things which 
cannot be described.* 

* Gen. xxviii. 12 ; Isa. vi. 2 ; Matt. xvii. ; iv. 1 - 11 ; 2 Cor xii. 4. 



84 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

Now the question arises, Do these facts stand 
alone, or are they shining portions of a universal 
law, which in its all-circling operations has in these 
instances come into light? Are they special agen- 
cies, which in these cases have come and gone, or 
are they simply openings through the veil, that show 
to us what always is taking place ? Was the spot 
where the patriarch slept indeed more holy than 
other places, and was the bush of Moses the only 
symbol of angelic ministrations? or rather, could we 
see as they saw, would not every spot be holy, and 
all nature seem aglow with those activities which 
run from the spiritual world into the natural? Was 
the Saviour of men our example in temptation only, 
or was he not also our example in victory, revealing 
to us those heavenly auxiliaries that work with us 
and strengthen us as we toil up the hill of Diffi- 
culty towards the regions of peace ? And on the 
mount of transfiguration, was the change in him, so 
that he appeared as never before, or was it in his dis- 
ciples, so that they saw him as he always had been, 
living in two worlds, walking on the earth and yet 
" the Son of man who is in heaven," talking with 
men and yet commercing with the skies ? To our 
apprehension, these facts are not single and arbitrary. 
Indeed, no such facts exist anywhere, could we read 
them aright. When we call them single and arbi- 
trary, we seem to forget that they presuppose those 
slumbering capacities that wait within us and the 
proximity of the sphere of immortality, and that our 
transit from this to that is only as " a sleep and a 



SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE. 85 

waking." Man could not be the subject of such 
revelations unless already he lived within the pre- 
cincts of the mystic world, and had a faculty within 
him to be acted upon by its essential laws. These 
concealments of matter which engird us are there- 
fore but frail walls that shut us in, which, falling 
down, give us sight of those higher skies that arch 
over us, and those brighter fields that lie around us 
trodden by the feet of angels, and over which breathe 
the airs of celestial love.* 



* We trust it is not necessary to point out to the intelligent reader 
the distinction between that influent life which we suppose to come to 
man from a spiritual world, and open communication and intercourse 
with its inhabitants. The former comes to him internally, not falling 
into his consciousness as a distinct mental process, but falling in 
with all the natural processes of thought and emotion, to render them 
healthy and pure. Open intercourse with the spiritual world, on the 
other hand, is the applying of its agencies to the outward senses. The 
former, like the Holy Spirit itself, unfolds our powers from within, pre- 
serves us in freedom, and fortifies our manhood. The latter comes to 
us in dicta from without, and may, if yielded to, destroy our freedom and 
break down our manhood. The veil that hangs between the two 
worlds of spirit and matter was placed there as a protection and guard, 
because in our present state we cannot bear an open view of spiritual 
realities. It is obviously not in the order of Providence to give to any 
one an open vision of any other sphere than the one in which his works 
and duties lie. What is beyond or above this, we take hold of by an- 
other and a higher order of faculties than the senses, so that no disturb- 
ing sights or sounds shall sway or divert us. In those cases recorded 
in Scripture, where mortals have been suffered to look behind the cur- 
tains of Futurity, we shall find that it was not for their special benefit, 
but on account of the historical crisis in which they acted, and then 
under a special Divine protection. While, therefore, we have no wish 
to discuss at all those phenomena known as " spirit manifestations," but 
leave them to work out their own legitimf.te results, we yet rescue our 
8 



86 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

Are we touching this theme with too bold a hand ? 
If it seem so to our sensuous philosophies, let it be 
borne in mind that we are interpreting, not only the 
word of God, but the latent convictions of the hu- 
man heart, and that when the philosophers are at 
variance with those convictions which form the sub- 
strata of universal belief, the philosophers are uni- 
formly at fault. What mean, not only these thoughts 
that wander through eternity, but the thoughts that 
wander from eternity into time, and lie on the com- 
mon mind like a haunting presence, unless it be that 
the spirit-realm already inspheres us, and stirs our 
souls with strange feelings and anticipations ? In 
those crises in the good man's life when darkness 
seems to brood over all his affairs, whence that com- 
munion which he has with the solemn troops of glori- 
fied saints, as if their faces shone through the clouds, 
and their conquering spirit had possessed his heart ? 
Yea, is not the scheme of Providence itself a grand 
system of mediation ? He moves on his vast designs, 



own doctrine from perversion. And we would say, that we believe the 
higher world of spirits may yet so act upon our faculties from within, 
and so mirror itself upon the enlarged and clarified reason, that the 
objects of faith shall be quite as real to us as the objects of sight, and 
the inner realms and orders of being in which we already live, be im- 
aged on the eye of our faith with a consistence and brightness that no 
external communications could give. Nay, further, we suppose it quite 
possible, that in this way we may come to apprehend spiritual laws and 
modes of being, while in the body, much better than many who have 
emerged out of it, and who, if they were permitted to speak to us, 
would give us, not laws of being, but disjointed facts, or fantasies 
without facts, and so only ply us with the gossip of then own sphere. 



SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE. 87 

not only by his own direct influence and agency, but 
by those ministries which descend, one rank beneath 
another, to the lowest affairs, and link the least event 
with the greatest. 

The spirit-world, then, is not far off. The good 
man with every new Christian grace is brought into 
holier affinities with the societies of the blest. The 
bands of angels come near and close around him, 
and when death uncovers his sight, it simply shows 
him where he is! More true is it than the writer 
himself intends who says it, that while his feet touch 
the earth, his head is " bathed in the galaxies of heav- 
en." The bad man withdraws from those blest socie- 
ties, and seeks alliance with the lost, so that when 
death opens his inner sight, it also shows him where 
he is ; shows him the community of woe into which 
he has introduced himself, and the baleful scenery 
that lies about him. Every day do we breathe the 
airs of heaven or the blasts of hell. 

When the first man saw the sun going down in 
the west, how might he have quailed at the thought 
that hopeless night and blank nothingness only were 
to follow. But it was the lifting away of that veil 
of sunbeams that did blind and dazzle him so that 
he could not see the vast creation in which he lived. 
The endless systems among which our little orb is 
interlocked by numberless bonds of attraction, and 
along with which it travels the celestial spaces with 
tremulous motion, would never have been known to 
us, unless the light that made us blind had been 
withdrawn, that we might gaze upon those giant 



88 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

wonders and glories. In like manner how does the 
deceitful glare of this earthly scene obstruct our vis- 
ion ! And how will the going down of its sun bring 
on, not the night we dreaded, but the vision of those 
vast orders of being to whose attractive power we 
had moved when we saw them not ! * 

* " Mysterious night ! when our first parent knew 
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, 
This glorious canopy of light and blue % 
Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 
And, lo ! creation widened in man's view. 
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
Within thy beams, Sun ! or who could find, 
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, 
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ? 
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife 1 
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life 1 " 

Blanco White. 
" The glories I have described cannot be all. Shrouded by the veil 
of day, they would, had the earth, like the sluggish moon, turned on its 
axis only as it moves in its orbit, have been hidden hopelessly and 
for ever by the gairish beams of the sun. Yes, though their bright 
haunts are always around us, and, in virtue of the universal sympathies 
of things, play upon our beings unceasingly, through influences and laws 
not yet unfolded, even their partial and interrupted cognition by the 
human spirit flows wholly from a physical character of our globe which 
perhaps might not have been. Is it not possible, then, that, through 
other conditions of our conscious being, we are engirt by other uni- 
verses, which, though at present veiled, — thinly it may be, — are yet 
real and vast as the world of stars ? What are those dreamlike and 
inscrutable thoughts, that start up in moments of stillness, apparently 
as from the deeps, like the movements of leaves during a silent night 
in prognostic of the breeze that has yet to come, if not the rustlings of 
schemes and orders of existence, near, but unseen?" — Nichol. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PRIMAL LNNOCENCE. 



' Dear child ! dear girl ! that walkest with me here, 
If thou appear'st untouched by solemn thought, 
Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, 
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
God being with thee when we know it not." — "Wordsworth. 



We have stated that the Holy Spirit is not a 
special agency that come3 and goes at certain sea- 
sons, to be sought in frames and raptures, but that 
efflux of light and life out of the Divine nature, 
which pervades the whole orb of being, and becomes 
immanent in the human soul. We now proceed to 
the illustration of this truth, and to this end we select 
first for consideration the period of childhood. 

We might well suppose that this would be pre- 
eminently the period when God would be around 
and within the little being, like an atmosphere of 
love. For not yet has hereditary evil been warmed 
into rank luxuriance. Its germination will come, alas ! 
as soon as the influence of the world falls upon it, 
or as soon as its growth from within shall reveal the 
leprosy that is lurking there. But as yet its germs 
are quiescent, and when can God be so near to it, 

8* 



90 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

and when can those angels that do always behold 
the Father's face bend around it, as now, with the 
imbreathing fragrance of heaven ? 

But let us come to the facts, and let us read thern 
aright. There are amiable qualities which in in- 
fancy are always more or less manifest, — innocence, 
tender sensibility, and unsullied love. They appear 
with entire spontaneity, as if a purer sphere were 
seeking to mirror itself in the crystalline spirit ere the 
motions of turbid passion have disturbed its limpid 
deeps. Along with these, ideas of God, of Right, and 
of Duty are awakened, generally with the earliest 
dawnings of the reason and the powers of language. 

But it is said that natural innocence and gentle 
dispositions appear also among the lower species as 
mere animal instincts, and therefore they do not in- 
dicate personal holiness. We are not saying that 
they do. There are a great many things which are 
good and lovely, which do not indicate the presence 
of personal holiness. The creative energies of God 
flow down and manifest themselves in lower forms 
than man, even through all forms of animate and in- 
animate nature. There in lower types are copied 
out his infinite wisdom and goodness. The bird 
of morning, without knowing it, pours her matins to 
the Creator's praise. The lamb that gambols over 
the pastures, the dove that hovers around us on 
gentle and graceful wings, are natural images of ce- 
lestial purity, innocence, and peace. Hence God's 
Spirit is called the holy dove, and Jesus is the Lamb 
o f God. Not only so, but these same images are 



THE PRIMAL INNOCENCE. 91 

found in inanimate nature, — in the dews that distil 
softly as God's grace, in the winds that breathe, like 
his spirit, the invisible element in which all things 
live, in waters whose suffusions upon the brow sym- 
bolize the all-cleansing suffusions of God's spirit 
within. Now how do these lovely and beneficent 
qualities differ, as they appear in nature and as they 
appear in man. Just here, — that in nature they are 
the unconscious and passive manifestations of the 
Divine goodness and reason, while man has the pow- 
er to discern their quality and receive and manifest 
them, not in obedience to blind instincts, but in obe- 
dience to a Divine command. Then he transmutes 
them from natural qualities into spiritual. They 
change their character when passing through the 
alchemy of a human spirit, and under the action of 
a human will. What else were natural amiability 
merely, is transfigured into the Christian graces and 
virtues. "What was natural becomes spiritual, as 
water became wine at the touch of Jesus. 

So then the natural innocence of infancy, though 
not holiness, any more than the natural innocence 
of the lamb, indicates, nevertheless, the preadapta- 
tions of the all-plastic Spirit to produce holiness. 
Those tender affections, and snow-white fancies, 
and guileless dispositions, in which during our infan- 
cy heaven ies about us, are soon to pass beneath 
the moral choice of a voluntary agent. He is to 
decide whether he will take up this heaven into his 
own breast and bear it away from natural things as 
his everlasting treasure, or whether it shall be lost 



92 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

and only remembered as the dream-light that reposed 
upon the hills of his childhood. So long as these 
qualities are merely natural, they are not his own. 
They wait to be appropriated. They may be 
wrought by him into his character as its essential 
elements, or when hereditary evil shoots up with 
tropic luxuriance they may be choked among the 
thistles and thorns. But how much is gained to us, 
that heaven is the first to mirror its eternal purities 
on our hearts and fancies, and that God's spirit is 
the first to enter the soul through its spontaneous 
motions ! Even though these visitings be rejected, 
they may linger on the memory like a dream of 
paradise, so that the grace-hardened sinner shall 
seem to himself to have descended into a world of 
guilt out of a preexistent state, " trailing clouds of 
glory " after him that were dissolved in the black 
night that finally shut him in, until, as it appeared in 
the visions of the opium-eater, he sees the towering 
gates of ingress at length closed upon him and hung 
with funeral crape. 

It furnishes strong conformation, we might al- 
most say absolute proof, of the view we are now 
taking of the state of infancy, that conversion is 
often produced by those tender voices of the mem- 
ory, coming down through a long past, waking up 
the feelings of childhood, and making its familiar 
scenery rush back in vivid pictures upon the fancy. 
The lessons of parent and teacher are forgotten, and 
seem to have passed away. The docility of the 
child is gone, the effusions of infantile affection cease, 



THE PRIMAL INNOCENCE. 93 

under the hard incrustations of the world. But some 
incident calls them back, some great truth put home 
with a point that pierces the heart, some stroke of 
God's providence that shivers through the layers of 
indifference and sin, and lo ! as by a magic wand, the 
burial-places of memory deliver up their dead, and 
they sweep in long procession down the desert of 
years ; the best impressions of childhood revive with 
amazing freshness ; the lessons long forgotten come 
back in the old familiar tones ; the texts out of the 
old Bible preach anew ; the prayers that went up 
from a mother's knee now plead afresh, nor plead in 
vain. The wanderer from home forgets a parent's 
blessing, and breaks his first resolves ; he plunges 
through the doors of infamy, and crime has become 
so familiar, that the conscience is dregged and the 
sensibilities are turned to stone. But he goes back 
to the spot whence his wanderings began ; the old 
hearth-stone is cold and the old faces are changed 
, nd gone, but the heart melts and the big tears of 
penitence roll fast upon a mother's grave. 

There are two passages in the teachings of our 
Saviour in which this philosophy of conversion is 
divinely set forth. The young ruler came to him, 
inquiring what he should do to inherit eternal life. 
So much there was of amiability in the person of the 
young man, so much of natural goodness blooming 
in his countenance, so much of gentleness in his ad- 
dress, for he came to him kneeling, that the sensibili- 
ties of the Saviour are touched, and beholding him he 
loved him. But these qualities are only natural ones, 



94 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

and when the Saviour puts him to the test of volun- 
tary obedience he fails.* Could we follow him fur- 
ther, how should we find that those graces which 
blossomed forth with such early promise faded away 
and disappeared, and that the amiable young man 
was changed into the hard and covetous Jew, not 
because those early qualities which put forth their 
spontaneous beauty were not good, but because they 
did not become fixed elements of character, through 
voluntary obedience ! How often has this history 
been repeated before our eyes ! And those qualities 
and graces, which in childhood are the living trans- 
parencies through which " the kingdom of heaven " 
shines down into the kingdom of nature,f are left 
behind, manifested in the spontaneity of the child, but 
not fixed in the voluntary life of the man. And yet 
repentance may bring them back; for we read of 
another who wasted his substance in riotous living, 
so that fain he would have herded with the swine. 
But he thinks of his father's house, sweet memories 
are stirring at his heart, and he " comes to himself." 
He goes back to the sunny spot whence his wander- 
ings began. The scenes of his innocent days, that 
never ceased to haunt his visions, are given back to 
his eyes, and there, where he tended the flocks, and 
drove them afield, he weeps away his guilt on his 
father's bosom. $ 

We have seen an incident quoted from Audubon's 
Ornithology, illustrative of the principle which we 

* Mark x. 17. + Matt. xix. 14. i Luke xv. 11. 



THE PRIMAL INNOCENCE. 95 

have in hand. It is found under his description of 
the Zenaida dove. " A man who was once a pirate 
assured me, that several times, while at certain wells 
dug in the burning, shelly sands of a well-known key 
which must be here nameless, the soft and melancholy 
notes of the doves awoke in his breast feelings which 
had long slumbered, melted his heart to repentance, 
and caused him to linger at the spot, in a state of mind 
which he only who compares the wretchedness of 
guilt within him with the happiness of former inno- 
cence, can truly feel. He said he never left the place 
without increased fears of futurity, associated as he 
was, although I believe by force, with a band of the 
most desperate villains that ever annoyed the Flor- 
ida coast. So deeply moved was he by the notes of 
any bird, and especially those of a dove, the only 
soothing sounds he ever heard during his life of hor- 
rors, that through these plaintive notes, and them 
alone, he was induced to escape from his vessel, 
abandon his turbulent companions, and return to a 
family deploring his absence. After paying a part- 
ing visit to those wells, and listening once more to 
the cooings of the Zenaida dove, he poured out his 
soul in supplication for mercy, and once more be- 
came, w T hat one has said to be the noblest work 
of God, an honest man. His escape was effected 
amidst difficulties and dangers, but no danger seemed 
to him comparable with the danger of one's living in 
violation of human and Divine laws ; and he now 
lives in peace in the midst of his friends." * 

* Quoted in the New Jerusalem Magazine, March, 1842. 



yb THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

We should even suspect the genuineness of that 
conversion which did not reawaken these spiritual 
states of childhood. It was produced, we should 
fear, solely by the terrors of hell, and not by the 
more sweet and tender calls of God's spirit, and 
the result would be the austerity of the bigot, and 
not the spirit of the child.* Such conversion is 
an angular turn in one's history, an arbitrary fact 
forced upon him, having no genial connection with 
his past and his future. All the past is rejected 
as worthless, and along with it the gales that come 
from the climes of morning, and " breathe a second 
spring." It is not so of conversions which are true 
and genial. As we journey from the East, we de- 
scend into the vale of shadows, but the regions of 
the dawn do not quite disappear. We still catch 
gleams of the golden sunlight on the orient hills. It 
is a most interesting and significant fact, that in that 
old age which is pious and serene, and in which the 
work of regeneration approaches its consummation, 
the memories of childhood are more distinct and 
vivid than of the long intervening years, so that the 

* " Men laugh at the falsehoods imposed on them during their child- 
hood, because they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the 
past in the present, and so to produce, by a virtuous and thoughtful sen- 
sibility, that continuity in their self-consciousness which nature has 
made the law of their animal life. Ingratitude, sensuality, and hard- 
ness of heart, all flow from this source. Men are ungrateful to others, 
only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with 
joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the 
past, they are dead to the future, or seek for the proofs of it everywhere, 
only (where alone it can be found) in themselves." — Coleridge. 



THE PRIMAL INNOCENCE. 97 

extremes of life are brought into nearest relationship 
with each other. Even, then, if we lose sight of the 
spot whence our weary march commenced, yet when 
we climb the western summits and look back, that 
spot comes into view again ; and though the space 
between were long and dreary, yet at the beginning 
and the end of our course are the peaks that jut out 
of time into eternity, in full view of each other and 
with the light of heaven playing on their summits. 

We suppose no Christian doubts that the Saviour 
of men clothed himself in our weak and suffering 
nature, that, in all its weakness and all its suffering, 
sympathy and succor might come to it out of his 
divine compassion. He made the divine grace avail- 
able to us in every possible stage of our pilgrimage. 
It is a question, then, well worthy the attention of 
those who think childhood is to be kept for future 
repentance, and is expected, meanwhile, to run into 
all kinds of depravity, whether Christ is indeed 
an all-sufficient Saviour, and whether his dispen- 
sation of grace is wide enough to span our whole 
existence ? And why did he become not only man, 
but also a little child ? Why did he " wrap the cloud 
of infancy around him," except that he might hold 
undisturbed communion with our " simplicity." 
Why, but to pass through the whole circle of human 
wants, desires, and sufferings, and take up every 
portion of human experience into his own, that no 
period or condition of life should be bereft of the 
aid of the great Mediator? How strange the notion, 
that, while he helps the mature and the strong, the 



y» THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

helpless little ones he leaves as orphans ! But no ; 
the Dove's white wings also hover over them, and 
shed stainless glories upon them, and the Lamb of 
God, who taketh away the sins of the world, is es- 
pecially with the infant and the little child to en- 
sphere them in his own innocence and purity. 

The Saviour declared of little children, that of such 
is the kingdom of heaven, and that whoever receives 
that kingdom must receive it as a little child. We 
quote the following, not only for its prophetic insight, 
but as the best exposition that we can find among 
the " commentators " of the Saviour's language. 

" Such hues from the celestial urn 
Were wont to stream before mine eye, 
Where'er I wandered in the morn 
Of blissful infancy. 
This glimpse of glory, why renewed ? 
Nay, rather speak with gratitude, 
For if a portion of those gleams 
Survived, 't was only in my dreams. 
Dread Power ! whom peace and calmness serve 
No less than nature's threatening voice, 
If aught unworthy be my choice, 
From thee if I would swerve, 
O, let thy grace remind me of the light, 
Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored, 
Which at this moment on my waking sight 
Appears to shine, by miracle restored ! " * 

* See Wordsworth's incomparable " Evening Ode." 



CHAPTER, V. 

LIGHT IN DAKKKESS. 

" Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind." 

The spiritual nature in man, answering to the 
spirit-world to which he is destined, and in which 
he already lives, is hardly less perceptible in his 
most fallen state, than in his state of primal inno- 
cence. We will not say that he may not fall so 
low that the Spirit shall cease to strive with him, and 
the inward ear shall be deaf to the heavenly voices. 
The Saviour speaks of a sin against the Holy Ghost, 
in contrast with the sin against the Son of man* 
The last might be forgiven, the first never. The 
careful reader of the New Testament knows very 
well, that the terms " Christ " and " the Son of man " 
are often used representatively for Christianity itself, 
or the system of truth which Christ embodied and 
revealed. The Holy Ghost, on the other hand, de- 
scribes, as we have seen, an influence through man's 
inmost being, the pulses of divine life through the 
centre and core of his heart. The first is truth pre- 

* Matt. xii. 31. 



100 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

sented from without, — the other is the divine love 
that vibrates through the universal soul. Truth 
presented from without may be rejected, and yet one 
may be saved, for the error may lie no deeper than 
the understanding. Not so when the pulses of the di- 
vine life shall cease to beat within, for then the heart 
changes into the insensibility of flint, and nothing 
can melt it again. Therefore he who rejecteth Di- 
vine Truth may be forgiven, but he who rejecteth 
the Holy Ghost out of his heart hath no forgiveness, 
for he hath rejected the sovereign agency in his re- 
demption. The first sin the Church has been swift 
to punish, while in more than one stage of her his- 
tory, by killing that life out of which bloom the 
charities and humanities, she has herself, like the 
Jews of old, fallen into the last, most deadly of all 
heresies. 

But these belong to that stage of man's history, 
or those periods of the world, where guilt reaches 
its culmination. They imply still, that man is an 
organized recipient of life from God, and that guilt 
and sin only in their ultimate results can destroy that 
last tender place in the soul, through which come the 
pulse-beats from the eternal love. 

The state of worldly indifference is not a state of 
repose. The mind is tormented with ideals of a bet- 
ter state, and the heart is conscious of deep wants 
that are never satisfied. How could this be, unless 
the dreary present saw something in contrast with it- 
self ; unless the splendors of immortality let fall their 
struggling beams through the envelopments of world- 



LIGHT IN DARKNESS. 101 

ly insensibility. They sleep, "perhaps to dream," 
and dreams of a bliss unrealized disturb the slumbers 
that else were the slumbers of death. Every sigh 
for a better life is the Come up hither of the glorious 
multitude, whose invitations fall down into the soul 
and rise up again in never-ceasing echoes. This 
could not be unless the mind opened inward towards 
a spirit-realm, and voices more than mortal talked 
along the solemn avenue. 

Even the hardiest unbelief has those doubts and 
misgivings which come from the angel-voices that 
will not quite be driven out, or from that Divine 
Word which shineth in the darkness, though the 
darkness comprehendeth it not. Those who thought 
they had convinced themselves that the eternal Past 
and the eternal Future were regions of blank noth- 
ingness, and the questions Whence? and Whither? 
no other than if you shouted into a chasm, have 
found that some new experience opened unknown 
depths within them, and brought new faculties into 
exercise, and then beyond the chasm the Delectable 
Mountains rise clearly on the sight. Unbelief is sel- 
dom satisfied with its creed of denials, so that 
through its regions of desolation the pilgrim often 
travels to the most unshaken ground of his faith. 
How could this be, unless a spiritual world were al- 
ready acting upon his spiritual nature ? How could 
the spiritual faculties awake, whether they would or 
no, and give out the Memnon sounds, unless smitten 
with beams from other worlds, and made responsive 
to unearthly melodies ? If the light comes not to 



102 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

bless and to save, it will come at awful intervals, like 
flashes of lightning at midnight, to make the dark- 
ness visible. Perhaps there is not a more significant 
passage in religious literature, than the suppressed 
passage of Mr. Hume, where he describes the in- 
fluence of his speculations. He surveys the habita- 
tion which, with infinite logical skill, he has builded 
about him', and he starts with horror at sight of the 
gloomy and vacant chambers. " I am astonished 
and affrighted at the forlorn solitude in which I am 
placed by my philosophy. When I look about, I see 
on every side dispute, contradiction, and distraction. 
"When I turn my eyes inward, I find nothing but 
doubt and ignorance. Where am I, and what ? 
From what causes do I derive existence, and to 
what condition do I return ? I am confounded with 
these questions, and I begin to fancy myself in the 
most deplorable condition imaginable, environed in 
the deepest darkness." The desolation and the emp- 
tiness are seen and felt, but they could not have been, 
except in contrast with a light too early lost, or by 
some star not yet gone down in the sky. 

Not indifference and unbelief alone, but con- 
firmed impenitence and guilt, are alike illustrative of 
the truth in hand. The darkness of the hardened 
transgressor is not solid and uniform. It lies be- 
tween spaces of light. It is flecked with sunbeams, 
and because he will not follow the light, it only 
makes his night more baleful. What mean the 
forebodings that visit his pillow when this outward 
scene is withdrawn, unless at that hour the forms 



LIGHT IN DARKNESS. 103 

of another world are flinging their giant shadows 
upon his spirit ? And what are the perturbations of 
his mind, but that which some one has finely de- 
scribed as the tremblings of the scale of Divine Jus- 
tice ? The Holy Spirit comes in showers of grace 
to those who welcome it and follow its light, but to 
those who do not, it turns to showers of fire. For 
the conflict in the soul of guilt is none other than 
hereditary and acquired corruption, seen and felt in 
awful contrast with the Perfect Law, the everlasting 
Right. This contrast could not be effected, unless 
the divine sphere of purity reached the soul, and 
produced the avenging consciousness of violated 
justice ; unless some drops of divine light fell upon 
the conscience ; unless the absolute law shone down 
through the soul, and shot through the moral nature 
the arrowy lightnings of remorse. 



CHAPTER VI. 

DISTINCTIONS. 



" I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of 
us, and it is the Spirit of God ; the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty 
essence which is the life and radical heat of spirit and those essences that know not 
the virtue of the sun, — a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell. This is that gentle 
heat that brooded on the waters and in six days hatched the world : this is that irra- 
diation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of fear, horror, despair, and pre- 
serves the region of the mind in serenity. Whoever feels not the warm gale and 
gentle ventilation of this spirit, (though I feel his pulse,) I dare not say he lives." — 
Sir Thomas Browne. 



It results from the foregoing argument, that there 
is in human nature an inborn capacity for goodness, 
virtue, and holiness, since by its very constitution it 
is made, from the beginning, receptive of the Divine 
Spirit, and opens inward towards the influence of a 
spiritual world. Hereditary corruption may gather 
around this inborn capacity, and human nature may 
be filled with the germs of all evil ; still, through the 
inmost recesses of the soul God is always speaking, 
always operating, always waiting to be received. 
This is the strength which is always available to 
human weakness, this is the consuming fire which 
fills the souls of the guilty with corroding memories. 

It will be seen at once, that this is a very different 
doctrine from that which gives to human nature 



DISTINCTIONS. 105 

original and independent powers for virtue and prog- 
ress. Human nature is sometimes represented as 
capable of self-development, through its own sepa- 
rate resources. Or yet again, as a spark struck out 
from the Divinity, to shine ever afterward through its 
own unborrowed effulgence. Man, like God, has the 
power of originating truth and goodness, through 
the independent exercise of his own faculties. 

We represent, on the other hand, that man no 
more originates truth and virtue, than the plant orig- 
inates the sunshine in which it warms and expands. 
Like the plant, which is an organism to receive the 
light and the heat of the solar beams, and through 
them to be clothed in glories more rich and varied 
that those of the robes of Solomon, so the human 
soul is an organism to receive divine light and in- 
fluence, and through that to grow into all the graces 
and glories of Christian excellence. If the light were 
put out in the heavens, all the beauty would vanish 
from the many-colored landscape, and darkness fall 
upon the fields like a pall. So if at any moment 
human nature were cut off from the Eternal Light, 
all the excellences and graces which make up the 
scenery of the moral world would vanish in uniform 
night. 

We distinguish, then, between an original capacity 
for goodness and original goodness itself; between 
the power of originating truth and the capacity of 
receiving truth and being formed thereby into its re- 
splendent image. And we hope to make it appear 
that this distinction is of such vital importance, that 



106 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

there is no true progress unless it be kept steadily in 
view. 

Let one start, then, with the assurance that moral 
excellence is self-development out of an original 
fund of goodness deposited in human nature, the ex- 
ercise of an independent faculty of his own. It re- 
sults inevitably from this, that all culture will start 
from self and centre around it, and have self-exalta- 
tion for its object. It results just as inevitably, that 
all the pride of the natural man will be excited and 
developed, and intellectual culture and religious 
forms and ceremonies will serve alike to inflame its 
fires. The dignity of human nature will consist, not 
in its capacity to receive the Divine Image, as the 
placid and lowly lake receives the glowing skies into 
its tranquil deeps, but in its power of exhibiting a 
dignity and splendor out of itself, which resemble 
the splendors of the Godhead. The human soul will 
seem to itself a portion of the Divinity, and sufficient 
unto itself for all its progress and culture. What- 
ever virtues and moralities are put on, they are but 
the exhibitions of self; whatever be the forms of de- 
votion, they are but the splendid liturgy that "wafts 
perfume to pride." These moralities and devotions 
will be lifeless, and they will only serve to wrap 
round and decorate the corruption of the natural man, 
a corruption that is never subdued and never re- 
moved. Hence there is so much of self-culture with- 
out self-renovation, so much of outward conformity 
where there is no inward life, so much of natural de- 
pravity that lurks under the vain disguises of Chris- 



DISTINCTIONS. 



107 



tian civilization. That which is God-given, man 
claims as his own, and turns to his own private uses. 
He steals the eternal fires. The virtues are his own ; 
they come not from hourly acknowledgment and 
sell-surrender. There can be no morality which 
shall be redolent of the divine life within, no regener- 
ation, no worship that shall be any better than gild- 
ed mockery, until men in spiritual things as well 
as natural shall cease to violate the awful command, 
" Thou shalt not steal." 

In contrast with these ideas, and the culture which 
grows out of them, we put forward the doctrine that 
the Divine Spirit, though immanent in man, is not a 
part of man, not a separate faculty of his own. He 
may not appropriate the empyrean light, and claim it 
as his, for then the light being shut in becomes dark- 
ness, and the divine voice, being confounded with 
his own instincts, is changed into babblements and 
lies. On the other hand, the source of this Light 
must be profoundly acknowledged, and our daily de- 
pendence upon it. Then it stands apart in its awful 
sanctity and authority: we dare not steal it and 
appropriate it, but we bow before it in lowly surren- 
der. Not self, but God, then becomes the radiant 
centre of all our thoughts. Conscience is not now 
a self-moving power, but a capacity through which 
a Power which is out of us and above us sends its 
eternal utterances into our inmost being, showing 
our own corruptions in mournful contrast with the 
Absolute Purity and Excellence. Then we do not 
attempt to bring down the Divine Spirit to the level 



108 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

of our own powers, but we suffer it to lift us up into 
the circle of its own radiance : we do not impress it 
into the service of our own interest and pride, but 
we suffer it to abase our pride, and we sacrifice all 
our interests to its behests. Then we do not con- 
found its voice with the suggestions of our own pas- 
sions, but we suffer it to cleanse away our passions 
and bathe our souls in its all-entrancing beauty. 

Coleridge has somewhere described a man who 
used to take off his hat with great demonstrations of 
respect and deference whenever he spoke of himself. 
Perhaps there was more method in his madness 
than might at first appear. Let the idea of the Di- 
vine Personality be lost, and then God will be 
merged in nature or in man. The universal reason 
becomes itself the Divinity, and first obtains imper- 
sonation in individual men. So the creature's per- 
sonal attributes become divine, and self-contempla- 
tion is the highest devotion, and self-worship is his 
daily ritual. Not the surrender of all his powers to 
the one Infinite Person to be shaped anew by its 
sovereign and plastic influence, but the exaltation 
of those powers to the place of God when most they 
need strength, and guidance, and renovation, — this 
becomes the characteristic of self-culture. Then 
one's own cognitions are the supreme authority and 
his own utterances the infallible oracle. " Ye shall 
be as gods," knowing good and evil, through self- 
illumination. And these are the gods from whose 
afflatus come confused prophesyings, which throw 
the world into bewilderment, or fill the air with the 



DISTINCTIONS. 109 

babblings of strange tongues. This is the religion 
for which the man in Coleridge instituted the most 
appropriate ceremonial. But the light within is not 
the scintillation of our own faculties, but the truth 
streaming in upon us from above, and claiming to 
be recognized and acknowledged. God did not 
create the human machinery and leave it to work 
out its own results.' He creates us always in the 
present time. He works within us to will and to do 
of his good pleasure, on the single condition of self- 
surrender. This apprehension of man's relation to 
the Highest is calculated to beget in him that sweet 
sense of hourly dependence by which alone he is 
truly exalted, that self-abasement which comes of 
self-revelation, that state of hourly prayer whence 
rises to God the soul's unceasing hymn. The con- 
trast which we present, therefore, is the contrast 
between self-exaltation and self-abandonment ; be- 
tween the arrogancy of pride and the grace of hu- 
mility ; between the attitude of self-sufficiency and 
the attitude of continual prayer ; between a world- 
liness decked out in religious forms and decencies, 
and a piety that warms in the divine effulgence; 
between a worship that centres around self, and a 
worship that brings us lowly before God ; between 
a soul that stands in the cold shimmer of its own 
vanities, and a soul clothed in the Divine Beauty as 
with rainbows. 



10 



CHAPTER VII 

TOTAL DEPRAVITY. 



" How, it is inquired, are infants regenerated who have no knowledge either 
of good or evil ? We reply, that the work of God is not yet without existence 
because it is not yet observed or understood by us." — Calvin. 



We are not at all anxious to keep terms with the 
old theologies, much less to gloss over any real dif- 
ferences between falsehood and truth. But the ter- 
minologies of religion become so vague and so emp- 
tied of their primitive meaning, long before they fall 
into desuetude, that it is necessary to subject them 
to a clear analysis to see for what ideas they stand, 
or whether they stand for any. It is a fact very fa- 
miliar to the historian of opinions, that an old sys- 
tem of theology may pass clean away, and a very 
different one take its place, without the least change 
in the old creeds and nomenclatures, just as the 
Roman republic passed into the empire, and liberty 
changed into despotism, without the least change in 
the forms of government. Nay, when men become 
secretly conscious that the ancient faith is leaking 
out of its symbols, it is quite observable how they 
cling to the symbols with a fiercer dogmatism, in 
order to elude the charge of innovation and heresy. 



TOTAL DEPRAVITY. Ill 

In this extreme anxiety to preserve the husks of 
dead men's thoughts, it may come to pass that those 
whose creeds are hostile may agree substantially 
both in opinion and sentiment. As it is not the 
husks, but their contents, that we care for, we wish 
to compare our doctrine with that which may be 
supposed to be current under the term " total de- 
pravity." 

We classify the internal forces of human nature 
under a threefold division. Under the first division we 
place those which are evil in themselves, and only 
evil ; those which do not admit of being changed into 
any thing good, but which require to be expunged 
altogether. Among these are those corrupt acquired 
instincts which have become the inheritance of fallen 
man, hatred, malice, revenge, deceit, cruelty, ac- 
quired lusts, and selfishness in its myriad forms. 
These, we have seen, when once acquired, are trans- 
missive from one generation to another. They are 
not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can 
be, because in their essential character they are the 
very opposites of the Divine nature. They are that 
" body of death " which all along through the centu- 
ries has formed and stratified upon our burdened hu- 
manity, and which can in no wise be incorporated 
with it, but which must be rolled off, as the burden of 
the pilgrim rolled away when he came to the cross. 
Under the second division we place the natural ap- 
petites, affections, and powers ; and these are good or 
evil according to their ultimate ends, according to 
the service in which they are used. Under the con- 



112 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

trol of the Divine law they are good, under the con- 
trol of the selfish nature they are evil. The appe- 
tites are g6od when they serve the higher nature; 
when their end is self-indulgence, they degenerate 
into brutal sensuality. Family affections are good 
and pure when their end is mutual improvement 
and aid ; bad when their end is mutual indulgence 
and the exhibition of family pomp and pride. Noth- 
ing can be so disinterested as a mother's love. 
Nothing, again, can be so intensely and intolerably 
selfish. Family affections bring us into a more 
tender and loving fellowship with all the families 
of men, or else they are the forms of a noxious self- 
love, and they differ from those of a gross personal 
selfishness only because they reflect its hateful fires 
in a circle removed one degree further from us. Men 
will even commit greater wrongs to aggrandize their 
families than they would to aggrandize themselves. 
Intellect, when enlisted in the service of God and hu- 
manity, pouring light upon man's path to guide him 
to happiness and to heaven and lead on the groping 
nations to their millennial era, is a sublime and benef- 
icent power. When enlisted in the service of wrong, 
having private honor and advantage for its end, and 
leading astray by cunning arts and glozing sophistries, 
it is the very attribute of archangel ruined. These 
natural powers, therefore, whether intellectual or 
affection al, are good or bad according to the motive 
force by which they are impelled and guided. Be- 
tween God on the one hand, and self on the other, 
thay hang and tremble ; but it is the tendency of 



TOTAL DEPRAVITY. 113 

hereditary corruption to make them sway in the > 
wrong direction with cumulative weight ; to make 
the balance come down on the side of evil. But 
under the third division we place those sacred ca- 
pacities which are the crowning glory of human na- 
ture, the capacity already described, of receiving the 
Divine Light and Life and making God operative in 
man. This capacity does not " tend to all evil," but 
to all good, since it is the ground of the regeneration 
of the individual and the progress of the race. It 
implies too the power of choice ; choice between the 
agencies which we will suffer to shape our charac- 
ters ; choice between the influence that comes down 
to draw us into the heavens by its sweet persuasions, 
and the influence that comes up from below and 
seeks to draw us downward by its infernal sorcer- 
ies, — that power of choice in which consists the 
moral agency of man. 

Now if by the term human nature we mean to 
include the forces belonging to the first two divis- 
ions here named, and exclude the last, doubtless it 
is inclined to all evil, and averse to all good. Man 
shut in to himself would be abandoned to all deprav- 
ity. There is hereditary corruption that sways him 
from behind, and then his natural powers and affec- 
tions have lost that equipoise which they had in 
primitive man, and are deflected towards the service 
of the selfish nature. Appetite, natural affection, 
and the natural reason would all go over to the ser- 
vice of the evil powers, and toil in the bondage of 
sin. On their swift and downward course they 
10* 



114 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

would rush into the most frightful outbreaks of wick- 
edness. But if by human nature we mean the sum 
total of all its capacities, and therefore its receptivity 
of the Divine force itself, — its capacities that open 
inward towards immensity and immortality, and of 
choosing the guidance of that power that shall bear it 
sun- ward like the eagle, — then we ought to abandon 
the word " total " in describing its depravity, as lead- 
ing to confusion of thought and unnecessary misun- 
derstandings. Even that theory of conversion which 
makes it instantaneous would logically presuppose 
an inborn capacity to be converted. We take it, 
that it does not quite mean to confound man with 
brutes and fiends, and that there is some reason in 
the nature of things why sovereign grace should se- 
lect human beings for its objects rather than wolves 
and tigers. Even, then, if the Holy Spirit were not, 
as we contend, the divine fire that warms in our 
heart of hearts, and from the dawn of existence 
seeks to kindle within us all holy affections, — ■ even 
if the orbit of our being lay through spaces of total 
blackness until some sudden light came blazing 
through it like a comet, — still we must be so or- 
ganized as to be receptive of the light when it comes 
and be acted upon beneficently by the new power 
whenever it strikes us. We do not see, then, that 
our account of human nature differs from that of 
these theorists, when consistent with themselves, 
so much in regard to its real and intrinsic powers 
and propensities as in regard to the Divine plan of 
acting upon them. This difference, we will not dis- 



TOTAL DEPRAVITY. 115 

guise, is sufficiently wide, — the difference of suppos- 
ing the child to be born into a state of the dreariest 
orphanage, to do nothing but sin up to the era of his 
conversion, and to be educated for repentance, and of 
supposing him at first the child of a Father whose 
claiming voice he ever hears, and whose spirit, unless 
rejected, ever shines within him " as glows the sun- 
beam in a drop of dew." It is the difference be- 
tween a regeneration which may commence with 
the very dawn of being and prevent the leprosy from 
ever appearing in the voluntary life, and the regener- 
ation that finds man full grown in evil, and lifts him 
out of the pool of sin, and attempts to bring him to 
life as you bring back life to the drowned, which 
must be done, if at all, with unutterable pangs. 

Nor yet, again, is it to be disguised, that some of 
the old formulas and terminologies exclude from the 
original constitution of man any such forces and ca- 
pacities as we have placed under our third division. 
They even take from him the power of choosing any 
thing but pollution, and the capacity itself of receiv- 
ing the Holy Spirit is only the result of a new crea- 
tion. Calvin says of infants, " Though they have not 
yet produced the fruit of their iniquity, yet they have 
the seed of sin within them ; even their whole nature 
is as it were a seed of sin, and therefore cannot but 
be odious and abominable to God." * But the old 
formulas themselves become flexile to the all-reno- 
vating Spirit that sweeps them through, and dry 

* Institutes, Book II. Ch. 1, Sec. 8. 



116 THE SPIRITUAL NATURE. 

bodies of divinity find a new life forming under the 
ribs of death. No matter whether the ancient sym- 
bols remain or not. Unless swept away by God's 
reviving breath, they will be warmed and bent by it, 
and we cannot keep out of them the plastic spirit 
which creates all things new. Those who thought 
they were ruling opinions with an iron rod find, to 
their surprise, that the rod, like Aaron's, has " bud- 
ded " in their hands. We may even wake up some 
pleasant morning, and find that we have written out 
here a chapter in that progressive orthodoxy which 
has made its ancient symbols pliant to the shape 
of modern ideas. "Whether so or not, God's truth is 
moving surely on to its triumphs. Those petrifac- 
tions called creeds, the cooling down of the religious 
sentiment into solid crust, cannot contain or shut in 
a still deeper religious sentiment that swells beneath. 
Even the creed-makers had thoughts and inspira- 
tions which could not be condensed into the formu- 
las, for the Eternal Word shone through them as 
through all. Calvin himself, after having made out 
that infants are abominable to God, goes on after- 
wards to represent, with admirable inconsistency, 
that they are the objects of the Divine love ; * for the 
central truth of the Gospel could not escape him, 
that God's love to the world even in its fallen state 
was the reason why he gave his only begotten Son 
to redeem and save it. And Augustine asserts the 
identical doctrine which in this chapter we have 

* Institutes, Book II. Ch. 16, Sec. 1, 2. 



TOTAL DEPRAVITY. 117 

aimed to develop : " Wherefore in a wonderful and 
divine manner he both hated us and loved us at the 
same time. He hated us as being different from 
what he had made us ; but as our iniquity had not 
entirely destroyed his work in us, he could at the 
same time in every one of us hate what we had 
done, and love what proceeded from himself." 



PART III. 



THE NEW MAN. 



IF ANY MAN BE IN CHRIST, HE IS A NEW CREATION. — 2 Coi\ V. 17. 

" 'T is a new life : thoughts move not as they did, 
With slow, uncertain steps across my mind ; 
In thronging haste, fast pressing on, they bid 
The portals open to the viewless Wind, 
Which comes not save when in the dust is laid 
The crown of pride that gilds each mortal brow, 
And from before our vision melting fade 
The heavens and earth, — their walls are falling now ! 
Fast sweeping on, each thought claims utterance strong, 
Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore ; 
On from the sea they send their shouts along, 
Back from the cave-worn rocks their thunders roar, — 
And I a child of God, by Christ made free, 
Start from death's slumbers to eternity." — Jones Vert. 



I 



CHAPTER I. 
KEGENEKATION. 

" Most of us are fragments and divorces, the products ci some former violence or 
convulsion, but such, is not he [the new man], but rather a fair planet on which 
Eden continues. Things to us the most irreconcilable are his sweet harmonies. 
He is most wilful when he is doing God's will. His human reason is most independ- 
ent when he is recipient of a divine revelation ; his truth and God's belong all the 
more severely to each, because they are the other's. The efforts of his genius are 
his obedience to a divine commission Whatever he thinks is a thought en- 
riched ; whatever he does is a marriage deed. Thenceforth his doctrines embodied 
and illuminated axe sights and sounds, — things seen and heard." — J. J. G. Wil- 
kinson. 

We propose now to display, in as clear a light as 
we can, the nature of regeneration, and the means 
by which it is accomplished. We devote this chap- 
ter to the first of these topics, — Who and what is 
the new man ? 

We trust the preceding chapters have partly an- 
ticipated the answer, and rendered the path of our 
present inquiry open and clear. Regeneration im- 
plies three things: first, a cleansing away of all 
hereditary corruption ; secondly, a restoration of 'the 
natural powers and affections to their appropriate 
service, or changing their inclination from self and 
making them incline to God ; thirdly, receiving the 
divine life through those capacities that open up- 
ward towards God, and towards his angels. It is 
11 



122 THE NEW MAN. 

obvious, however, that the divine work is accom- 
plished in an order exactly the reverse of the one 
now stated. For the first ground of our regenera- 
tion is the spiritual nature, the immanence of the 
Divine Spirit in the human soul. Its commencing 
dawn is the coming on of that light that visits our 
infant being, until God shines within like another 
sun, diffusing warmth and radiance through our 
whole nature, and drawing us towards himself in 
the bonds of an all-attractive love. Then God be- 
comes the prevailing force within us, and he bends 
our natural powers towards himself, and draws them 
all into his service. Appetite, affection, intellect, 
active powers, all yield to him and serve him. The 
end of animal appetite is not animal pleasure, but 
manly development ; the end of parental instinct is 
not its own indulgence, but the highest good of off- 
spring ; intellect serves God and not self, and genius 
no longer sings war-songs and bacchanals, but is the 
prophet of God's hidden truth, and lifts its hymn to 
his praise. The possessory instinct is guided to 
new ends, and property is acquired and held, not 
for self-aggrandizement, but for beneficent activity 
and useful living. All the instrumentalities of earth 
are converted into a means for the highest culture, 
and the highest culture is a solemn preparation to 
serve God and humanity. So the whole object of 
life is changed ; and the natural powers, whose bal- 
ance inclined towards the selfish nature, have that 
balance reversed and all the faculties bend towards 
God. Lastly, all hereditary evil is expelled, — that 



REGENERATION. 123 

gang of lusts and passions, and the brood of lies 
which they engender, which require to be killed, 
since they cannot be converted ; to be scourged out of 
the temple, since they cannot be made fit for its 
service. They are the native savages that must not 
be spared, but exterminated, when God's chosen 
ones come in to take possession. They are what 
Paul calls the " old man with its lusts," which is to 
be " put off," or which is to be " crucified " and 
" buried." These are opposed to the Divine nature ; 
and as God comes within us with growing efful- 
gence and power, they are driven out before him, — 
not without man's effort and cooperation. It is the 
denial of these evil tempers and instincts, that 
causes the struggle in his nature, and costs him 
painful vigils and conflicts, as if his soul were the 
battle-ground between the hosts of heaven and the 
hosts of hell. But victory succeeds to victory, and 
when the last foe is slain, he walks in the strength 
and peace of God, free and joyous as the angels. 

This spiritual change, when all its inward pro- 
cesses are laid open and displayed, appears as the 
pilgrim's progress from the city of Destruction to 
the city of God. And here let us guard from error. 
No one is regenerated unless he comes to something 
more than "indulging a hope," or so long as the 
land of promise lies off in the distance, and is not a 
present possession and fruition. The new man is 
not one who has got some mystic title-deed to the 
heavenly country hereafter. He is the man whose 
foot already is planted on its ground, and who 



124 THE NEW MAN. 

breathes its fragrance ; into whose soul, that is, 
heaven has passed and is passing now. For the 
change of death is merely external ; it only removes 
our fleshly coverings. It does not remove us; it 
only takes off a veil. The natural man, with his 
lusts and world-ward inclinations impelling him one 
way, and the divine force acting through him and 
impelling him another way, is swaying between 
heaven and hell. He chooses between these two 
forces, and says which shall draw him to itself. If 
he chooses wrong, his inmost mind passes from 
change downward to change, until it is moulded 
into the very image of hell, and is drawn by the 
most secret affinities to its abodes. Its spirit 
breathes upon him now ; he suffers its pains, he 
keeps carnival with its horrid jubilees, its gates open 
on his soul, he descends through them and they shut 
over him, and death only comes to take the bandage 
from his eyes, that he may look round on his habita- 
tion and his home. If he chooses right, then his 
inmost mind changes the other way, drawn up 
among the saints and the seraphim ; heaven draws 
around his spirit, and folds him in ; he breathes its 
airs, he is filled with its harmonies ; he hears in his 
own moral nature its chimes hardly mellowed by 
distance ; he holds fellowship with its shining ones ; 
and death by and by unclogs his senses, and gives 
to his open vision the land of peace. The great 
sentence, Come, ye blessed ! and Go, ye cursed ! is 
the everlasting law which is executing itself every 
day upon us, and while yet in the flesh we get wide 



REGENERATION. 125 

asunder as the poles with the impassable gulf be- 
tween. So, then, we say that regeneration is obtain- 
ing possession, for it is passing into the society of 
the redeemed, which on earth and in heaven make 
but one communion. And if any one should object, 
that it is not given to man here on the earth to pass 
into these high spiritual frames, or pitch his tent on 
this mountain of golden peace, we simply take issue 
upon the fact ; for we know those and read of those 
who have the world under their feet, with whom the 
struggle is past and the victory won ; and God's 
angels are with them as " a camp of fire around." 
Still, it is undoubtedly true, that the work of regen- 
eration is not generally consummated here ; and the 
present condition of the Church and society and ed- 
ucational systems suggests that we need not seek 
far to find the reasons. But we are here describing 
what regeneration is in its own nature, its processes, 
and its consummation. 

Let us now seek for some of the characteris- 
tics of the regenerate state. And we premise, that 
the new man is indicated by the new motives 
whence all his actions flow. There are three classes 
of motives by which we are impelled to seek the 
paths of duty and obedience. These are fear, and 
hope, and love. When an impenitent man first 
wakes up to a sense of his danger, the first motive 
that impels him very often is fear, fear of the dismal 
results into which he knows he is plunging. He 
feels that nothing awaits him but trouble and unrest 
as he sinks away into darkness. He flies to religion 
11* 



126 THE NEW MAN. 

as a refuge of safety. It may be that his heart 
opens up its mysteries into his consciousness, and 
its uncleanness lies exposed in the light that gleams 
from above. But his obedience at first is compelled 
and outward. At best, his joys and raptures come 
and go, and do not pass into permanent frames. The 
Adam of consciousness is not dead, but only sleep- 
eth, and sometimes it wakes again with terrible en- 
ergy, and prevails. Still, at times he has prelibations 
of the heavenly peace and foreshado wings of a bet- 
ter world. And here, it may be, through genuine 
self-consecration and reliance on the Divine promise, 
he begins to hope for heaven. But hope of reward, 
as such, is not a motive very much higher than the 
fear of punishment. It may be, and often is, based 
on delusions and fictions in theology, before there is 
any change in the inward man. Reformation is 
not regeneration, conformity is not worship, the 
wording and rewording of liturgies is not prayer, 
and hope of heaven is not the peace of its com- 
mencing dawn. Not until the Spirit abiding within 
has melted the soul beneath the glow of the Divine 
charms, not until the angel band of heavenly affec- 
tions comes in, and the gang of selfish lusts goes out, 
do old things pass away and all things become 
new. Then begins the highest motive-power, which 
is love; for he that loveth is born of God and knoweth 
him. When our regeneration is consummated, love 
expels every other power, and reigns supreme and. 
undivided. Now the soul hungers and thirsts after 
righteousness, as for daily bread and for living waters. 



REGENERATION. 127 

Now we obey the commandments because we love 
them, and it is our meat and drink to do the will of 
the Father. Fear is cast out ; hope of reward has 
no place, for the Divine service is its own great re- 
ward, its own exceeding joy. Obedience is sweeter 
to the soul than light is to the eye, and sin, not in 
its consequences, but in its own essential nature, is 
more bitter than death, and more loathsome than 
the grave. Inclination becomes a safe and unerring 
guide ; for to do right we have only to follow our 
impulses, and do what we love. We follow after 
duty with a passion and an appetite. We need not 
reason out what duty is, and get at our result 
through uncertain and labyrinthine windings. We 
have but to follow our desires, since we cannot de- 
sire what is wrong. The Holy Spirit, transfused 
through all our faculties and all our cleansed affec- 
tions, becomes itself an instinct of our being, mak- 
ing the soul one flaming and undivided passion that 
urges on to its object, as unerring as the instinct 
that urges the bee to her cell. Affection and truth 
are one. That is to say, truth does not teach one 
thing, and affection crave another. Truth shows us 
the way we love, and we love the way it shows, and 
so affection and truth are one principle of action, 
even as the light and heat make one ray in the solar 
beams, which create their own paradise where they 
fall. Then ceases the conflict within. There is no 
clashing of interest with interest, no balancing of 
one inclination against another, for none other force 
acts within us than God's impelling love. There is 



128 THE NEW MAN. 

no self-denial, because there is no self to be denied. 
That is crucified and slain. We pass into that high 
state of which we had dreamed, and for which we 
had sighed, when we do just what we please, and 
all that pleases us we may do ; when we have no 
painful duties to perform, since duty is the glad 
motion, the spontaneous play, of all our faculties. 

There is a floating philosophy which teaches .that 
the impulses and intuitions of human nature are a 
sure guide, because they are the inspirations of God 
in humanity. But it does not recognize the distinc- 
tion between humanity fallen and humanity reno- 
vated, and thus it is liable all the while to confound 
the corrupt instincts of the natural man with the 
clarified affections of the man created anew. It has 
no rule to distinguish hereditary proclivities to evil 
from the divine impulsions which move us after he- 
reditary evil is extinguished. It makes that a rule 
of action for sinful man, which can be a safe one 
only for the redeemed. It has no analysis that 
searches us and cleaves the evil from the good, 
setting one over against the other and saying, Avoid 
ye that, and Follow ye this. And so it would put 
us on the fiery waves of corrupt desire, and let us 
float passively along to destruction, if only we drift 
past flowery banks and spicy groves before the rapids 
begin. It confounds human nature in its chaotic 
state with human nature distributed, after the spirit 
has brooded upon it and reduced all things to their 
class and order. It is by a higher and a self-revealing 
philosophy, that we come, through self-denial, to that 



REGENERATION. 129 

sta:e of unchartered freedom in which there is no 
self to be denied, where our six days of toil and 
struggle have ended, and we enter on our sweet 
Sabbath of repose. 

The regenerate state, again, is characterized by a 
new kind of worship. God is revealed as never 
before, the light and the joy of our whole being. 
He sees nothing in us now that he does not love, 
for he sees his own work and he calls it good. He 
glows within us as our life and peace, even as the 
sun loves to look into the placid lake and make his 
image there. We pass into that state of prayer 
which cannot be translated into the clumsy vehicle 
of words ; that still communion, to which a ritual is 
a clog and a burden ; that devotion which knows of 
no declensions, since the sun that warms it never 
sets. Its worship is not the worship of those who 
meet to chafe each other's zeal that is flagging and 
growing cold, and who leap on the altar and cut 
themselves with knives, because the fire will not 
come down. It is love communing with love ; the 
sons of God shouting for joy, their worship jubilant 
and spontaneous as the song of the summer bird 
on the airs of morning. 

The regenerate state is characterized by more ex- 
ternal changes. The world within flings its hues 
and colorings over the world without, and in some 
sort creates it anew. The natural powers and fac- 
ulties, even to the natural body, our most external 
envelopment being brought into the service of the 
highest sentiments, conforming to the divine life 



130 THE NEW MAN. 

within, and made pliant to its touch, are transfig- 
ured by it and reflect its glories. "We have often 
seen how heavenly affections will create a new face 
under the ugliest features ; how the members yielded 
to unrighteousness and made flexile to the deforming 
passions are moulded by them, till the whole man 
becomes the image of the sin he loves. So it is that 
the spiritual nature operates its changes outward and 
downward ; that the Adam of consciousness holds 
us like clay in his hands, and makes our members 
the moulds of his dehumanizing lusts, while the 
Christ of consciousness changes us back into the 
figure of divine affections. The " old man with his 
lusts " therefore is put off, even to his literal embody- 
ment, as the new man is formed beneath and claims 
to fill and shape our most outward being, when we 
seem changed, and, 

" As a troop of maskers when they put 
Their visors off, look other than before." 

Even Nature herself b&comes changed, for how va- 
ried does she appear to us, according to the eyes 
through which we look, and whether we see her 
work as a hard material fact, or the picture-language 
that shadows forth immortal things. The natural man 
sees this world only from the natural side. No light 
from the other side shows him the meaning in hum- 
ble affairs, and the redolence that breathes out of 
them, and the divine airs enfolding every object. It 
is the difference between seeing this world only as a 
material structure, contrived for man's present grati- 



REGENERATION. 131 

fication, and viewing it as the scene of his training 
for the skies ; as exhibiting an exterior and perish- 
ing beauty, and as penetrated by an intelligence 
everywhere infused, that copies out the Everlasting 
Mind and opens everywhere a holy bible to human 
ken. Jonathan Edwards has alluded to this change 
in describing his religious experience : " My sense 
of divine things gradually increased, and became 
more and- more lively, and had more of inward sweet- 
ness. The appearance of every thing was altered ; 
there seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet cast or 
appearance of divine glory in almost every thing. 
God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, 
seemed to appear in the sun, moon, and stars, in the 
clouds and blue sky ; in the grass, flowers, and trees • 
in the water and all nature." And one of yet clearer 
prophetic insight than that of Edwards describes the 
same thing as a sense sublime 

" Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the breathing air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, — 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

Last of all, the regenerate state is characterized by 
a new morality. Works are filled and vitalized by 
that angelic benevolence which is not complete until 
clothed and ultimated in action. The works of the 
natural man are done for wages. The fear of hell 
scares him from wrong-doing, or the hope of heaven 



132 THE NEW MAN. 

lures him to work in the master's vineyard and bear 
the heat and burden of the day. Hence there is so 
much of sighing and fainting under the weary load 
of present duty, among those who look away to some 
future heaven where there will be nothing to do 
but play on golden harps and sing pleasant songs. 
Hence the religious life and the practical, here on 
this earth, have been so riven asunder, religion re- 
treating away into conference-rooms and prayer- 
meetings, and cathedrals on whose mystic silence no 
murmur breaks from without, while the field, the 
workshop, the mart, and the hustings are bereft of 
her presence and left dreary and profane. Even 
when their work is done from a religious sense of 
duty, it is not always true that religion is in the work. 
Perchance it only commands the work to be done. 
Not so when the regenerate life clothes itself in new 
moralities. Then works are to the soul what utter- 
ance is to genius, whose necessity is, I must speak 
or else I die ; and whose glorious conceptions lie on 
the soul like a burden, and flood it with a beauty 
which it cannot bear, until those conceptions are 
born into the actual world, and embodied in the can- 
vas, the marble, and the epic song. Then genius 
sees its heaven coming down to earth, and taking 
form in outward things, and it stands face to face 
with its own lovely creations. So it is with the 
man created anew in Christ Jesus and inspired with 
heavenly sentiments. His appropriate works are 
where these sentiments are embodied in loveliest 
forms, and his daily duties become the poesy of life, 



REGENERATION. 



133 



always inspired from above, always fragrant with the 
breath of praise. Ideas of goodness, beneficence, 
justice, and truth, always rolling in upon the soul 
when filled and warmed with the supremely good 
and fair, always seeking on earth their imbodiment 
and resting-place, leave us no peace unless we will 
give them shape in outward things, and carve the 
substance of this world into their own bright and 
heavenly image. And then we are blest, supremely 
blest, for our daily prayer has its daily fulfilment, 
that God's will be done, as in heaven, so also on 
the earth. "We greatly mistake the essential wants 
of humanity, if we suppose that the same relation 
between our inmost life and our outermost practice 
will not subsist after we have done with time. And 
perchance, because in the spiritual world forms and 
substances are more yielding and passive to the plas- 
tic spirit within, the moralities of heaven shall be 
more redolent of its life, and its forms be sculptured 
into more perfect moulds of the everlasting Truth 
and Beauty. What higher bliss can we sigh for, 
than that our feet may move on this swift obe- 
dience through the unending ages, bringing the 
loftiest ideals into the lowest actualities, and mak- 
ing the harmonies between these two our working 
song? 

There is one qualification which we ought to 
make. We have described the regenerate man as 
one in whom instinct and impulse are a safe and un- 
erring guide, since the heart can crave nothing that is 
wrong. We ought, however, to allow, that until not 
12 



134 THE NEW MAN. 

only the individual is changed, but until the world 
around him is changed also, the best man will here 
find sometimes a conflict between his feelings and 
duties. In the punishment of crime, in the great 
battle with wrong, we may be called to sacrifice and 
suffering, and the performance of what are called 
painful duties. But even so the regenerate man is 
sustained and cheered, and triumphs over pain ; and 
as fast as the world around him is changed and 
renovated, these painful duties diminish. They will 
cease entirely, when not only the breast of the indi- 
vidual, but the world that lies about him, shall be- 
come truly the mirror of the skies. 

The sum of our doctrine, then, on this vitally im- 
portant subject is this. 

Regeneration, in its internal nature and process, 
includes three things : — 

First, the receiving the divine life into our inmost 
being through those capacities that open inward to- 
wards God and the spirit- world, — the divine life im- 
parted by the Holy Spirit that ever breathes through 
the heart of humanity. 

Secondly, moved by this divine and attractive 
force, our natural powers, intellectual, affectional, 
and active, incline towards God, and are drawn into 
his service. 

Thirdly, all corrupt instincts, whether we acquired 
them ourselves or received them as the foul inherit- 
ance of the past, constituting the Adam of con- 
sciousness, are expelled. This is the old man which 
is put off as the new man is unfolded from within. 



REGENERATION. 135 

The new man is known and characterized, — 

By the new motives which are the springs of con- 
duct. Hope of reward and fear of punishment both 
give place to an ever-abounding love. In other 
words, we act not from motives drawn from the fu- 
ture, but from the glad promptings of the present 
hour. Hence, again, — 

By a new kind of worship ; for we do not seek 
God to purchase his future favor, or to deprecate his 
wrath, but because he is our present life and joy, and 
our powers lift the spontaneous hymn to his praise. 

By a new enjoyment of external things, since the 
light and peace within us invest the world without 
us with their sun-bright hues, and since even the 
body which we wear is pliant to the new power 
that shapes the internal man, and makes the ex- 
ternal reflect its radiance. 

By the new morality in which the new life seeks 
expression and embodiment, when the soul puts on 
righteousness, and it clothes her, and makes justice 
her robe and diadem. 

The means by which this great change is effected 
are as various as the culture and discipline of life. 
In the following chapters we shall attempt to group 
together those which seem of the most importance, 
and which often lie nearest at hand when we seek 
them not. 



CHAPTER II 

CHOICE. 



" How precious a thing is youthful energy ! if only it could be preserved, entirely 
englobed as it were within the bosom of the young adventurer, till he ctlf come 
forth and offer it a sacred emanation in yonder temple of truth and virt# j ! But 
alas ! all along, as he goes towards it, he advances through an avenue foimed by a 
long line of tempters and demons on each side, all prompt to touch him with their 
conductors and draw the divine electric current with which he is charged away." — 
John Foster. 



No diligent and candid reader of the Sacred Scrip- 
tures can fail to have discovered that the spirit-world 
is described by them under two classes of images. 
They open above us a region of infinite purity and 
love, where all that is good and happy is parted off by 
itself, and hangs above us like a firmament of grand- 
eur and beauty. They open beneath us a region 
where sin in its hideous shape sinks away to its own 
level, and seeks the hiding-places of a starless night. 
These two states are set over one against the other. 
It is the parallelism that runs through the whole 
Bible, and you scarcely open a page where you do 
not trace its lines distinctly and sharply drawn. 
No middle region is described in the land of souls. 
And this world of sense and matter is spoken of as 
hanging midway between those two great kingdoms 



* CHOICE. 137 

of Light and of Shadow. The world we now live in, 
mixed up as it is of good and evil, is constantly 
yielding back its primal elements, decomposing and 
parting off, on the one hand, the worthless dross, 
and, on the other, the clear and imperishable gold. 
Good and evil dissolve and part off by themselves, 
the good rising by its own affinities and seeking 
its kindred heaven, thus pouring ever fresh streams 
of life and blessedness into its abodes. The bad 
parts away, and is drawn to its like in the abysses, 
because there too is its kindred and its home. 

This doctrine we find drawn out in the parable of 
the tares and the wheat, growing together until the 
harvest, when the former are gathered into bundles 
and piled up for burning, and the latter is stored away 
in its garners. We find it touched off with a most 
graphic pencil in the parable of the sheep and the 
goats, where the Son of man sits among the assembled 
nations, and, as the solemn drama passes along, they 
part asunder under the opposite sentences, Come, ye 
blessed ! and Depart, ye cursed ! We find it, again, 
in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, symbol- 
ized in the great gulf that lies between the realm 
of Light and Bliss,. and the realm of Shadow and 
Pain. And again we find it in the Apocalypse, 
where the new heaven shines above, beautiful as a 
bride, and the lake of fire lies beneath, with all un- 
clean things that float on its noxious waves. And 
yet again we find it in our Saviour's description of a 
twofold resurrection; of those who have done good 
coming out of their graves to higher life and frui- 

12* 



138 



THE NEW MAN. 



tion, and of those that have done evil to a resurrec 
tion of condemnation and shame. 

Now it is somewhat surprising, at first thought, 
that, while the Scriptures abound in all this moral 
painting, it should have no greater power over the 
consciences and lives of men ; that, while these pic- 
tures are hung down out of the spirit-world into this, 
they have failed so much in arresting the gaze of 
mortals. We read over some tragedy that paints 
the happiness or the sufferings of human beings, and 
we thrill and weep at the winding up of its scenes. 
We take up some story of human fortunes abound- 
ing in human loves and interests, and we hang 
breathless over its catastrophes. Why is it, then, that 
the solemn drama of humanity, and the winding up 
of its fortunes, do not take hold of our deepest sym- 
pathies ? 

We apprehend the reason to be, that to many, per- 
haps to most minds, there is, after all, an appearance 
of unreality in these descriptions ; that they do not 
seem to have any basis in known facts, or to paint 
human character as we know it and see it. Perhaps 
an objection may lie in the mind of the reader 
somewhat after this wise. 

We do not see any such division of human charac- 
ter as answers to these pictures and images. Men are 
not all good, nor all bad, but between the best man 
and the worst there is every shade of character, where 
the colors run into each other. Take the highest 
grade of excellence that was ever attained to, take 
the lowest point of depravity to which humanity has 



CHOICE. 139 

ever fallen, and where on this descending scale will 
you put your finger and make a dividing mark, and 
say that all above are bound to one destiny and 
all below to another? The man just above it dif- 
fers only in the slightest shade from the man just 
below it. Good and evil are mixed up in every 
man's soul. They change and interpenetrate in all 
imaginable shapes and colorings. This division line, 
therefore, is merely arbitrary, and so a just and holy 
being can never make it. 

Now we hold and acknowledge that the facts of 
this life present a perfectly fair and valid ground from 
which to argue the facts of the life to come. Away, 
we say, with all theologies which sunder themselves 
from human nature. Man, as an immortal being, has 
only one continuous and endless life. It is not a 
life to be chopped into fragments which have no 
relation to each other. The future is an unfailing 
result of the present. The spirit-world is human 
nature more fully revealed and its powers more per- 
fectly dramatized, and unless the ground of this pic- 
ture-language of the Bible exist now and here in 
these throbbing bosoms, it exists never and no- 
where. 

But let us be cautious, and not reason from ap- 
pearances only. And we go on to show that the 
objection, which we have endeavored to draw out 
in its full strength, is specious and delusive. It is 
founded, we think, on shallow views of human 
nature, not on a perception of its more deep and in- 
tense -ealities. 



140 THE NEW MAN. 

For consider the matter. Is it not true that 
every man who comes to years of moral choice 
and responsibility has some purpose that governs 
him and gives unity to his life? Analyze your mo- 
tives and you will find it so. Every heart has its 
ruling passion, every life has its ruling principle. It 
is true that, under the urbanities and simulations of 
life, this does not always appear. But could you lay 
off from any one's heart all its envelopments till you 
came to the real man, you would find some princi- 
ple to which all others held a secondary and subor- 
dinate place. From the very constitution of human 
nature it cannot be otherwise. Human nature 
opens outward towards sense and inward towards 
God. The forces of hereditary corruption assail it 
from behind, and would draw it into the bondage of 
self and the world, while divine forces act upon it 
from within and above, and would draw it into the 
service of God and humanity. We must choose be- 
tween these two. On every human being devolves 
the fearful responsibility of being arbiter between 
them, and deciding which of these forces shall pre- 
vail. There, on his right hand, comes down the 
angel of truth, unrolling before him the Divine com- 
mandments, and pointing with directing finger to 
the bright and climbing pathway. There, on his 
left hand, stands at the same time the fiend of self, 
with his glozing seductions and lies. Is there any 
man to whom the angel of God's presence hath not 
come bringing the Everlasting Law, whether in the 
revelations of Christianity or in those veiled interior 



CHOICE. 141 

ministries which wait on the human soul under every 
form of religion and worship ? And is there any 
one whom the tempter hath not approached on the 
side of the selfish nature, that he might warm into 
life all the germs of hereditary evil, and make that 
the dominant power of the soul ? And doth it not 
appear, then, even as the Scriptures have put the al- 
ternative, that no man can serve two masters, since, 
while he follows and loves the one, he rejects and 
denies the other ? He chooses between them. And 
they are opposites. They have nothing in common. 
One begets in us the faith and the affections, the 
graces and virtues, which belong to the regions of 
light ; the other, those delusions and passions and 
corroding memories that people the realm of shades. 
But perhaps the reader will object, and say, " You 
do not yet meet the case. What if every man has 
his ruling principle, a principle chosen, if you will, 
from the code of heaven or of hell ? The best man 
does not live up to his own ideal, and is not all a 
saint. He has his faults and his short-comings. So 
the worst man is not all self. He has his virtues 
and his better feelings, and his character is not all 
dark and ugly." This is all true. But then it is 
also true, that the wrong principle, once chosen and 
followed and made vital, becomes central and con- 
trolling, and the virtues and graces are driven out 
towards the surface of the man. Such a man will 
do many good things, when they are not inconsist- 
ent with his main object and aim. He may even 
make the virtues his auxiliaries, and they shall sub- 



142 THE NEW MAN. 

serve his purposes But when the selfish nature and 
the Eternal Law come fairly and directly in con- 
flict, one must yield, and in this case it is uniformly 
the latter, while the other becomes ascendant. And 
so the wrong principle encroaches upon all his pow- 
ers, and has dominion over his whole nature. His 
character does not yet lie in total eclipse. But the 
line which separates the light and shade is moving 
the wrong way ; and how long will it be, unless he 
changes and makes a new choice and so reverses 
the process, before that which should have been the 
guide of his life hangs darkling in the sky ? The 
dominant principle, the ruling love, shape the charac- 
ter more and more into their own resemblance and 
effigy, till even the virtues and graces are only hollow 
expediencies and imitations, — outside decorations, 
like flowers that blossom upon graves. 

And so, on the other hand, though every good 
man falls short of his standard, yet if he follows it 
in good faith, it leads him higher and higher. The 
selfish nature is denied, till finally it ceases to be. 
Selfish principles and passions hold a subordinate 
place. They are driven from the centre to the sur- 
face. The line of shade recedes, till the light of his 
life emerges clear and full in the heavens. Whoever, 
in short, chooses the right, and is ruled by it, grows 
better and better.' Whoever chooses the wrong, and 
is ruled by that, grows worse and worse. Is not this 
huma i nature ? It is true that this process working 
within us in the very core of our being does not al- 
ways appear at once upon the surface. But the 



CHOICE. 



143 



man whose principle of life is wrong has his internal 
character constantly transforming into the false and 
the evil. And this may go on awhile under a fair 
exterior, under the show of morality, under the show 
of worship itself. But all these externals are to fall 
away. We rise into the spirit-world with no dis- 
guises about us, where the inner life is brought 
forth in open and substantial manifestation. 

To our apprehension, therefore, this moral paint- 
ing of the Bible, which parts men off into opposite 
groups and companies, becomes most intensely real. 
The deep-working principles of human nature are 
prophetic of this grand consummation, and make 
these results inevitable. We may choose which 
class of forces shall sway us. But having chosen, 
our souls are moved on by impulsions which we 
cannot reverse or divert from their crisis. If no 
Bible had opened to us a revelation of things to be, 
human nature were itself a Bible whose open pages 
would disclose this final catastrophe. 

We ought, however, to concede so far to the 
objection which we have in hand, as to allow that 
self-love takes various forms, from the most malig- 
nant to the most mild, and that the great principle 
which, with unerring precision, cleaves asunder the 
good and the evil, does not separate the one into the 
same state of fruition, nor part off the other into one 
mass of woe. Neither heaven nor hell is one, but 
multiform, and the law of a just retribution will be 
applied to us, when we shall reap down the harvest 
which we sow. What we argue is, that God and 



144 THE NEW MAN. 

self, good and evil, heaven and hell, are opposite in 
nature and principle, and by no skill of the pencil 
can one be made to shade off into the other. By no 
contrivance, divine or human, can they be made 
to dwell together in peace, but they tend to separa- 
tion by their own elective affinities, and their strug- 
gles towards that separation occasion the perturba- 
tions of this our state of mingled good and evil. 
The good angel stands on one side, and the evil ge- 
nius on the other. We hear the first in a thousand 
pleadings and calls to duty. We hear the other in 
the seductions of self-interest and self-indulgence. 
We follow one or the other, and so our most inter- 
nal character is changing from glory to glory, or from 
shade to deeper shade. This power of choice, then, 
is an awful power. The child, as soon as he can 
understand the w T ords Right and Wrong, stands be- 
tween the world of Light and the world of Shadows. 
He comes into society. Two rules of action are 
placed before him, that of the Gospel and that of the 
world. He chooses between them. He makes one 
supreme and subordinates the other, for there is no 
middle ground. If he chooses the first, the good 
angel ever beckons him on in a path that finally 
opens upward into fields of everlasting fruition. If 
he chooses the other, the path leads downward, — 
how easy at first to tread ! but it grows darker and 
more rugged, till his feet stumble on the dark moun- 
tains, and he falls benighted into the abyss below. 

The test here presented, we say, is philosophi- 
cal, and stands clear of the cabbalistic theologies. 



CHOICE. 145 

There is no long and crabbed creed to be learned, 
no mystic experience to be had through charms and 
conjurations, no faith in mere dogmas to be " im- 
puted for righteousness." Turn where you will, 
reader, there are two principles of conduct written 
out and blazing upon you, one of self and one of 
Christ. On the one hand is the Gospel, and on the 
other are the world's hollow maxims and shifting 
expediencies. As soon as you rise in the morning, 
the right and the wrong present their alternatives in 
every deed you do. No subtile system of ethics 
needs unfolding. There is the path on the right, 
and there on the left. Under one of two ruling 
motives, every deed ranges itself at Once. And 
though the divergence between these two paths 
may seem at first slight and unimportant, yet that 
is the starting-point of all the differences that follow 
after. They have been compared to two lines start- 
ing from the same point. However small the angle 
they make, they diverge wider and wider the farther 
they extend. And if infinitely extended, they di- 
verge to an infinite distance. So between two per- 
sons choosing, one a right rule of life, and the 
other the wrong. Their characters at first may not 
seem so very different, but the fatal angle is there ! 

So much depends on this fearful power of choice, 
the first power to be exercised when our regenera- 
tion begins. On these silent volitions of the breast 
hang such amazing and eternal fortunes. No won- 
der, then, that such powers wait upon us, to bend 
our will upward or deflect it downward. And no 
13 



146 THE NEW MAN. 

wonder that, to impress upon us the importance and 
consequences of moral choice, God has hung down 
to us out of eternity the roll of destiny, painting on 
one of its folds the upper world, with its hills and 
vales reposing in the soft beams of peace, and on 
the other, that world over which roll the clouds of 
an unavailing sorrow, — yet clouds which conceal 
far more than they disclose ! 

An Eastern monarch, on the eve of battle, stood 
surveying the countless battalia that swarmed in 
the plain beneath him, till he burst into a flood of 
tears. " Why do you weep," said his courtiers, "for 
the victory will soon be ours." " I weep," said he, 
" to think that in one hundred years not one of these 
hostile myriads will be alive." But the Christian 
imagination forms to itself a conception more au- 
gust and solemn. The myriads that swarm over 
the earth's surface ! To-day alive and busy ; to- 
morrow brushes them from the scene. And amidst 
infinite varieties of taste, affection, and motive, 
two master motives are severally supreme. Every 
heart has been touched and polarized by one of 
two opposite magnets : death comes to remove out- 
ward and artificial restraints, and lo ! this mass of 
humanity separates and sweeps towards its opposite 
poles. 

If, when these momentous alternatives were first 
presented, — for they are presented to every human 
being, — if, when first he heard the pleadings of the 
angel in his breast, or the sorceries of the tempting 
fiend, this power of choice were exercised with de- 



CHOICE. 147 

cision on the side of right, and the life of regener- 
ation chosen with alacrity and energy, all else would 
follow in its time and order. This vow once made, 
and this great work of self-consecration once com- 
menced in good faith, we have the promise that 
more agencies than we can take notice of wait upon 
us, that they may smooth out our way before us. 
This efficient exercise of the power of choice, — 
choice between the motive-powers that shall rule 
us, choice between the two worlds that draw us 
contra-wise, and fling over us the alternations of sun 
and shade, — is the first step in the Christian life, and 
that step firmly taken, the victory is half won. For 
the heavens themselves then bend around us to 
guard us on, and our decision, we are assured, sends 
through their ranks a wavelet of joy. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE BOOKS OPENED. 

" I presuppose a humble and docile state of mind, and above all the practice 
Of prayer as the necessary condition of such a state, and the best, if not the only, 
means of becoming sincere to our own hearts ; — those inward means of grace, 
without which the language of the Scriptures, in the most faithful translation, and 
in the purest and plainest English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead lan- 
guage, — a sun-dial by moonlight." — Coleridge. 

It is an obvious condition of man's regenera- 
tion, that he know himself. He must see the evil 
that is in him, in order to its extrusion. And 
yet so manifold are the envelopments that infold 
him, that he bears about unscanned the mysteries 
that lie within. We live mainly in externals, and 
hence we are disguised from ourselves. Hence 
our imperfect view of human nature ; hence our 
shallow culture, — so often the outside gilding that 
conceals a heart uncleansed; hence our surface- 
moralities ; hence our ignorance of the deepest 
springs of action in our own bosoms. "What is inly 
wrong, in order to be apprehended and expelled, 
must come within the clear range of our inward 
vision. How shall we have these self-re vealings ? 
By what means is the book of our life to be opened ? 

There is a way which is simple and direct, to him 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 149 

who earnestly desires to see himself as he is. It is by 
turning the soul towards God. It is by communing 
with the Eternal Purity, whose spirit ever broods 
over the chaos within us, and seeks to separate its 
elements into determinate form and order. Before 
the Divine nature, all that is wrong in our own 
is revealed by contrast, and appears black in the 
light. The Eternal Law shines down through our 
being, and shows our desires and aims, in opposi- 
tion to its own sanctity. It is the hatefulness of 
the selfish will in the presence of the All-Pure. 
Doubtless, the revelation is at first humiliating and 
painful. In that hour of self-conviction, the burden 
of our most inherent corruption hangs heavy on our 
souls. Two ideas, for the time, take sole possession 
of our minds, and fill the whole scope of our vision. 
Our inmost self how alienated ! The Divine na- 
ture how dazzling and dreadful in its holiness ' 
The contrast between these two makes us veil our 
faces in tears, and exclaim, " I shall die, for I have 
seen the Lord !" We cannot bear that " noon of liv- 
ing rays," when searched and laid open beneath it. 
He who thought himself rich and in need of nothing, 
now finds himself poor and in need of every thing. 
He who before was complacent and satisfied with 
the shows of a seeming morality, is startled and 
dismayed, as a light from out of himself is let down 
through the central places of his being, and reveals 
the secret corruption that lurks through all its wind- 
ing recesses. How false has been his standard of 
right, how low have been his aims, and what impu- 

13* 



150 THE NEW MAN. 

rities have tainted the springs of his conduct ! " I 
thought myself alive without the law," said the 
great Apostle, " but when the commandment came, 
sin revived, and I died." When the Eternal Law 
shone forth, the sin that was in me came full 
into the range of my consciousness, and instead 
of spiritual life, I found there a mass of death. 
Thus God, by his immanence in man, reveals, when 
invoked and welcomed, the afflicting contrast be- 
tween human corruption and the Everlasting Purity. 
What we have now described, is sometimes called 
" conviction of sin." But it is more than that. Sin 
pertains only to what is wrong in our volitions and 
actions. But now the sources of sin, lying deeper 
than all volition and action, are shown to us ; for 
the vain disguises of our self-love having withered 
away under the beams of the Divine countenance, 
the diseased mass whose hidden motions had swayed 
our volitions and conduct is disclosed, and makes 
us cry, " Who shall deliver us from this body of 
death ? " The Apostle, as above quoted, is not using 
the words sin and death as the synonyma of moral 
guilt, but rather of moral disease, from which guilty 
conduct flows as from a turbid spring. How often 
had our endeavors after holiness been defeated and 
baffled! how had the means of grace been repeated 
till they had become state formalities ! how had our 
vague dissatisfactions and our daily unrest pre- 
vented the peace of God and our sweet repose 
on the bosom of his love! The source of all our 
trouble has now been shown to us, as a new page 
in the book of our life has opened to our sight. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE BOOKS OPENED. 



u 0, ■what a sight were man, if his attires 
Did alter with his mind, 
And, like a dolphin's skin, his clothes combined 
"With his desires ! 

" Surely, if each one saw another's heart, 
There -would he no commerce, 
No sale or bargain pass : all would disperse 
And live apart ! 

" Lord, mend, or rather make us ; one creation 
Will not suffice our turn : 
Except thou make us daily, we shall spurn 

Our own salvation." — George Herbert. 



There is a legend of one of the ancient kings of 
England, that, returning from the Crusades, he was 
taken captive by his enemies, and confined in a Ger- 
man fortress. Languishing there in the darkness 
of his solitary cell, he was lost to his people and 
dead to the world, and fast perishing from the mem- 
ory of mankind. But there was a minstrel of his 
court by the name of Blondel, who sought to find 
him. He wandered in disguise through Europe, and 
played and sung under the windows of every prison, 
the airs which he and his master had sung together 
in days of old. At the last trial, after the first strain 



152 



THE NEW MAN. 



had died away, the second strain awoke from with- 
in the fortress, and rolled responsive from the prison 
cells. The lost monarch was found. 

Precisely such is the office which temptation per- 
forms for us. It reveals us. We mean by temp- 
tation, such surroundings as make us conscious of 
wrong desires, and draw us vehemently towards for- 
bidden objects. Any one seeking in good faith to 
know himself, may find all the shadings of his inmost 
being reflected back upon him, from the objects that 
lie along his path. For temptation puts nothing 
new into us. It only brings out before the sun 
something which existed there already. "We are 
enticed by the lusts that are within, and it is the 
lust which gives to the object without all its mere- 
tricious and seducing charms. The corruption with- 
in corresponds to the object without, and they call 
and answer to each other. If there were no lurk- 
ing evil in our nature, there could be no tempta- 
tions. They are the Blondels, whose songs and 
harpings are of the same air and dialect of some 
corruption within ; and so they respond to each 
other, strain for strain. Hence there is a meaning 
in the discipline of life, the myriad-toned language 
that comes to us from without, which we do not 
always seek to comprehend. One of the first de- 
signs of Providence in leading us through the paths 
of our probation here, is to show us to ourselves. 
The guilty man says, in extenuation of his crime, 
" If I had not been sorely tempted, I should not 
have fallen." So neither would you have known 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 153 

the evil that is in you. Providence led you into 
the midst of these surroundings, for the purpose, 
not of causing you to sin, but of showing you your 
propensities to sin, as if he had said, " Behold, I 
show you a mystery ! " How often has a man 
thought himself immaculate, until the attractive 
power of some object out of him caused the lurking 
corruption to leap up in his bosom. So it is with all 
the passions that lie coiled within. Circumstances 
do not create them ; they only evoke them from their 
mystic places into the light of our self-conscious- 
ness. One person brings into the world a revenge- 
ful temper. But who knew it while the infant was 
smiling in the cradle ? It is along with the provoca- 
tives of opposition, that it discovers its full strength 
and malignity. Another inherits a selfish love for 
acquisition. But it is not the infant brow that is 
pursed with calculation. It is amid competitions and 
scrambles for gain, it is among lands and stocks 
and treasures, that he feels the gnawings of the ac- 
cursed hunger for gold. The lust for place and 
power does not point to its unscrupulous arts, and 
the depths of its cringing baseness, until occasion 
and circumstance have uncoiled it, and we see its 
amazing possibilities. Thus are we led along the 
paths where the objects of our selfish love stir up 
the passions of the heart ; and then, if we will but 
watch its motions, we shall find those passions un- 
winding, one after another, until our inward life has 
been imaged back upon us, — and then we have 
seen ourselves! All the corruption of our natures 



154 THE NEW MAN, 

asserts its existence. We may deny it, we may 
slay it now if we will, and it shall never pass into 
our voluntary life. But in all its shapes it shall 
thus pass before the eye of self-consciousness, as 
clearly as the forms of future dynasties passed be- 
fore the wizard-glass of Banquo. 

It often occurs, that those who have never had 
these self-revealings will contemplate their own 
deeds with the deepest amazement. Their passions 
lay still within them like caged and sleeping lions, 
and they might have been led along under a dispen- 
sation of terror that overwhelmed and repressed 
their free moral agency, and their outward lives 
would have been perfectly blameless. But rather 
than human nature should bear onward all this 
hidden defilement, Providence permits these secret 
forces to be uncaged and set free ; and so they who 
will not seek a knowledge of themselves by self- 
examination and prayer are suffered to obtain it at 
the cost of bitter repentance and blasting remorse. 
" Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great 
thing ? " Who is Hazael, the blameless Syrian, 
that he should be thought capable of such awful 
crimes ? And the prophet answered, " The Lord 
hath shown me that thou shalt be king over Syria." 

Even the crimes of society, the collective man, 
might reflect back upon the individual the lurid 
colors of his own passions. Whence come wars 
and fightings ? They are the ultimation of the lusts 
of every man who loves not his neighbor as himself. 
Our selfish instincts are cruel as the grave. Hatred, 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 155 

love of rule, and the greed for gain, first rankle in 
the individual breast; they poison domestic and 
social relations, they demoralize parties, and finally 
they set nation against nation, and then they are in 
full blaze, giving the world an open view of the hell 
that had glared beneath. They are precisely the same 
lusts which, in private life, make man unjust or un- 
kind tc his brother, — only now they have obtained 
volume, and passed into combustion by union and 
contact ; and it is amid the demon-cries of the bat- 
tle-field, where the collective man is in action, that 
a permissive Providence confronts an unregenerate 
human nature with its own ghastly image. 

If some being were to alight upon this earth, his 
spirit susceptible only of those desires that glow in 
the seraph's frame, he would walk through all its 
corruptions with no thirst for its sinful pleasures. 
Yet the same environments that evoke from the un- 
regenerate heart its unhallowed desires, only set free 
the angel's affections and sympathies when that 
heart is purified of evil. Opposition calls forth from 
the natural man wrong for wrong. From the 
breast of the Divine Man, a flood of heavenly ten- 
derness was set free by the hand that smote it. Our 
regeneration, therefore, is consummated, not when 
we resist temptation merely, but when temptation 
is impossible, and no Blondel's harp can wake an 
echo to its strain. 

There is another province of human probation, 
similar to the one just described, which is called 
trial. It is trial in the strictest sense of the word, 



156 THE NEW MAN. 

for it is the grand assay which distinguishes the 
worthless dross from the pure gold. The first effect 
of suffering and affliction is to test man and to 
reveal him. It were easy to keep him in the way 
of obedience, by the pressure of outward motives. 
He puts on the blandishments and urbanities of 
the world, and every appetite is pampered, while 
the world calls him good and generous. He puts 
on the shows and seemings of worship, and he 
easily persuades himself that its sanctities enter 
into him in proportion to the solemnity and splen- 
dor of its ceremonials. Perhaps the deceiver has 
no art so cunning, and so often practised, as that 
which imposes upon a man by taking from him the 
substance of religion, and giving him its painted 
shell. He violates none of the moralities, he reads 
his Bible, he cons his liturgies and his prayers, and 
under a thin crust of respectability he conceals him- 
self from himself, and perhaps from his fellow-beings, 
because he does no wrong. Why should he do 
wrong, when the pressure from without keeps him 
perforce in the right ? But strip him of these ad- 
ventitious circumstances, take off the outward pres- 
sure, and let the inner man of the heart be released. 
Then it is often found that change of scene changes 
apparently the whole character, while really it has 
only disclosed it by taking off the shams that in- 
vested it. 

Both sacred and profane historians describe the 
scene within the walls of Jerusalem during its siege 
by the Roman army. The daughters of Judah late- 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 157 

ly walked her streets in glory and pride. They 
" make a tinkling with their footclasps, mincing their 
steps as they go." But now famine rages, and con- 
ventional rules are snapped asunder like threads. 
See the relative strength of the benevolent and 
selfish feelings, while hunger and despair rend away 
their disguises, and set them free. "Where now is 
religion, that came with votive offerings to the tem- 
ple ? where maternal love, of late clinging so fondly 
to her babes ? " The tender and delicate woman 
that would not adventure to set the sole of her foot 
upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her 
eye is evil toward her son and toward her daughter 
and toward her little one, for she killed and ate them 
for want of all things, secretly, in the siege." Even 
such are the susceptibilities and fountains in the 
heart which may be hidden under a glare of grand- 
eur. And so, betimes, the Divine Providence un- 
covers this under-world of passion and motive, and 
brings all its secrets into day. 

Hence come our trials, not often with crushing 
weight, but with such sharp severity as to cleave 
into our hearts and open them to our gaze. God 
smites our idols, that he may measure to us the 
extent of our idolatry. Not until then did we 
know whether this world or the other was supreme 
in our affections. Not until then did we know 
whether we had any faith or not. We are living 
in conformity with Christian rituals, and think we 
believe in immortality. Perhaps, in some such hour 
of self-confidence, "we have all been touched and 

14 



158 



THE NEW MAN. 



found base metal." The death-angel comes near 
us ; our loved ones fall around us, they seem to 
drop into blank nothingness, and we see then how 
earthly prospects had shut out the heavens, how 
infidel are our griefs, and how selfish our fondest 
loves. Or perhaps, broken by sickness, and wrung 
with chronic pains, the sufferer foregoes the pros- 
pects and pleasures which mankind so highly prize. 
"We wonder what all this means, till presently we 
see the meekest piety and the most deep and un- 
troubled devotion evolved from this very condition ; 
and when Resignation there appears leaning on her 
lowly and beautiful altar, and faith rises triumphant 
over pain, we are ready to pray for the same sharp 
instrumentalities, if so be they may work out for us 
the same exceeding weight of glory. For first they 
cleave into our natures and lay them open, albeit 
we lie lowly and bleeding, and then we know our 
deeper wants, and what we should seek, and what 
we should mortify and deny. 

We have heard much, and not unprofitably, of the 
dangerous tendencies of lax systems of religion and 
morals. Perhaps it does not occur to every one, 
that a religion of artificial austerity and gloom, 
though less dangerous to the state; brings a more 
deadly peril to the individual. It keeps the outward 
man from sinning, without cleansing the man with- 
in. It does not remove the depravity out of man, 
but drives it in towards the centre of his being, — 
out of his own sight perhaps, — and fixes and con- 
geals it there. He walks the path of obedience 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 159 

with trembling step, his soul never swept with the 
gales of Divine Love. But in another world, if not 
in this, the inner man must come forth and meet its 
own dismal retributions. These artificial motives 
cease to act, our sham-work falls away from us, and 
the natural heart appears just as it is, and fills its 
sphere of life with its own hideous shapings and 
colorings. And yet many a timid believer has been 
driven into some grim-looking " ark of safety," to 
escape from the fire-storms which were expected to 
come down upon all who remained outside. They 
are safe from the storms without, but not from the 
pent-up magazines within. That religion is the 
most safe, and that discipline the most merciful, 
which explores the heart most thoroughly, and pours 
the noontide into its chambers. 

Have you, reader, ever experienced a great sor- 
row ? and if so, have you not seen after wards how 
it discloses heights and depths in your spiritual 
nature which you had never known, and resources 
upon which you had never drawn ; how it produces 
susceptibilities which you had never before felt ; 
how it induces a tenderness of mind that makes it 
ductile almost as the clay, and ready to receive the 
stamp of the Divine image ; how little animosities 
and hatreds are banished and forgotten, while the 
heart has new yearnings towards all that live, and 
especially towards all that suffer ; how .the soul 
sickens at mere shows and appearances, and de- 
mands realities, while it hungers after the good and 
the true ; how this world recedes and grows less, 



160 THE NEW MAN. 

whib the world of immortality comes on as if 
now first revealed, and incloses you in its light, — ■ 
just as, when the glare of the day is withdrawn, 
and the darkness moves over us, we gaze on a new 
sky, and bathe in the starry splendors of the Milky 
Way? 



CHAPTER V. 

THE BOOKS OPENED. 

" There was silence, and I heard a voice." — Job iv. 16. 

Perhaps we are as little given to meditation and 
solitude as any people on the face of the earth. And 
yet among the most important aids to self-knowledge 
are the holy ministries of silence ; and there cannot 
be self-inspection at all without it. People must 
have, they think, one of three things, books, company, 
or business, else time is lost and the hours drag 
heavily along. Their minds must be taken up with 
other people's thoughts, with the clatter of words, or 
with the plunge into affairs. Even religious exer- 
cises, as they are often conducted, tend more to hide 
the individual heart than to reveal it. The world is 
full of noise, and there is as much noise about relig- 
ion as about business, and sometimes a great deal 
more. When one is always seeking to get a quan- 
tity of emotion poured into him, that he may pour it 
out again, or to have his heart-strings played upon 
among sympathizing crowds, he will often think he 
has " got religion," till in some hour of solitary temp- 
tation or midnight silence he finds his true self had 
u* 



162 THE NEW MAN. 

been lost sight of, and that in the midst of numbers 
he had failed to hear the most internal beatings of 
his own heart. 

Has the question never pressed painfully upon the 
reader, What manner of person shall I find myself 
when death has torn away all the concealments of 
sensible things and I stand alone with God ? What 
might I see if my heart of hearts were to symbolize 
itself before me, and I saw all its secrets standing 
out like pictures on the wall ? Paul even had re- 
volved this question anxiously, lest, having preached 
unto others, he himself should be cast away. We 
have the means of obtaining answers to these ques- 
tions which shall not be altogether indistinct. 

We shall find, by a little experiment and analysis, 
that the thoughts, images, and feelings that we have, 
come from two very different sources. First, they 
are suggested or forced upon us from without. They 
are poured in upon us from natural objects, from en- 
grossing affairs, from converse with books and men. 
None of these trains of thought and feeling are 
strictly and entirely ours. They were put into us ; 
and it may be that they have overlaid and concealed 
our deeper affections and sentiments. But there is 
another source of thought and imagery, and that is, 
our hearts in their spontaneous workings. When 
these thoughts and images come solely from within, 
when there is no sound and no object to suggest 
them and they arise of themselves and come up 
throng after throng through the brain, we may know 
that they originate in the life-cells of our being, and 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 163 

that they wear the colors of our own affections. We 

never know so well what is in us as in such moods 

as these. In order to this, all external things must 

be shut out from the sight and all sounds must die 

upon the ear. For this very purpose Providence has 

arranged the economy of our affairs, that the noise 

and the silence shall alternate each with the other, 

for at the close of every day he arrests the busy 

throng and hangs around the curtains of darkness, 

and there is no voice in the streets and no sound of 

wheels and footsteps ; — 

" When fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 
And all the air a solemn stillness holds." 

Would we know, therefore, whether the heart be 

clean within, and how it would be likely to appear 

when these outward swathings have been stripped 

from us and its hidden processes lie exposed ? In an 

hour when the wings of silence are brooding upon 

the spirit, and all external scenery has been blotted 

out, watch the thoughts and fancies that come up 

from within ! Be simply a spectator ; let them 

come of themselves, and sweep away as they will. 

Then it might often be found, that he who thought 

himself regenerate would discover impure fountains 

in his heart ; would see evil thoughts and corrupt 

imagery coming up out of it and thronging the 

chambers of the brain; would see memories coming 

back from places of forbidden pleasure, and looking 

pleasant as in days of old ; would find that sin had 

its charms and lures, and that he rolled it as a sweet 

morsel under his tongue, — that the whole style of 



164 THE NEW MAN. 

his thoughts was earthly and not heavenly, selfish 
and sensual, and not spiritual and pure. 

I would not even lose the benefit of the dreams 
that visit my pillow, of which Charles Lamb said, 
more truly perhaps than he intended, " We try to 
spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world, 
and think we know already how it shall be with us." 
For what are they, and what do they mean ? They 
are the motions of our involuntary machinery. By 
our voluntary powers we array about us such scenery 
as we will, and sit down amid sights and sounds that 
please and regale the senses. But when the volun- 
tary powers are suspended, the involuntary are wide 
awake, and they paint a new scenery about us : they 
dip their pencils in our most secret desires, and in 
the colors of those desires they set all things in array 
about us. They are the Guidos and Raphaels of 
our inner world, and their shadings and colorings are 
often the true representations of the inner life. A 
man shall then find, perhaps, his most cherished 
plans and most secret inclinations out of him. He 
shall see his secret self projected in the images that 
float around, and form the skies and landscapes of 
this microcosmic and spirit realm, suggesting to us 
that sure and deep-working spiritual law by which 
the celestial and infernal scenery are produced, — 
the heaven and hell hereafter, which are the exfigu- 
rations of a redeemed or a lost humanity. If there- 
fore the objects of pursuit which these involuntary 
powers array before us are mainly wrong, and the 
scenery which they paint is prevailingly impure, we 



THE BOOKS OPENED. 165 

may know that, we need cleansing yet ; for when 
our physical and spiritual natures are both brought 
into entire harmony with Divine laws, their involun- 
tary motions even shall produce no images but those 
of white-robed innocence. 

But there is another privilege which comes from 
the holy ministries of solitude and silence. It is 
solemn, devout, intense meditation. There is com- 
paratively little of this. There is much reading and 
meeting-going, and hurrying to and fro on business, 
but little of the brooding spirit of thought. And 
yet without the latter there is hardly such a thing 
as thorough self-knowledge and repentance. Men 
are moved in masses, or trained to the observance 
of conventional rules, and think themselves tolerably 
good. But not till they get out of the crowd and go 
away, alone, and there study the Divine law, and 
apply it to their individual failings and proclivities, 
does the secret heart lie exposed, and the light of 
self-conviction flash down through all its windings, 
and the beauteous light break on them from afar for 
whose repose they inly sigh. We live in external 
things and seek external excitements. And thus 
the mind takes into itself so much of what is coarse 
and earthly. Modern Christendom has abundance of 
Pharisees and Sadducees, and formalism and sensu- 
alism are not likely soon to pass away. But where 
are its Essenes, who sit alone in the solemn shadows 
where contemplation explores the starry deeps ? We 
need to pass alternately from the inward to the out- 
ward, and from the outward back again to the in- 



166 THE NEW MAN. 

ward ; for unless we seek these meditative moods, 
we sink lower and lower, till we are buried in sense. 
We lose all heavenly-mindedness, all clear intui- 
tion. We lose the tidings of immortality that float 
around us, and sound fainter and fainter within us. 
We lose that knowledge of ourselves which is the 
first condition of our regeneration, and without which 
all other knowledge is superficial. And we never 
ascend the glory-smitten summits whence a contem- 
plative faith gazes full into the opening Paradise 
of God. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 

" The mind of man desire th evermore to know the truth according to the most 
infallible certainty which the nature of things can yield. The greatest assurance 
generally with all men, is that which we have by plain aspect and intuitive behold- 
ing. "Where we cannot attain unto this, there what appeareth to be true, by strong 
and invincible demonstration, such as wherein it is not in any way possible to be de- 
ceived, thereunto the mind doth necessarily assent, neither is it in the choice there- 
of to do otherwise. And in case these both do fail, then which way greatest prob- 
ability leadeth, thither the mind doth evermore incline." — Hooker, Ecc. Polity, 

n.7. 

There are, we premise, two kinds of revelation 
from God to man. Truth may come to us through 
the deep and clear intuitions of the mind itself, 
when its dominions are given to the inward sense ? 
reposing in the sunlight of peace like a landscape 
beneath the eye. Then we know the truth or the 
falsehood of a proposition, not by reasoning out its 
results, but by the way it affects our higher sensibili- 
ties and by " intuitive beholding." A human na- 
ture entirely uncorrupt and unperverted would need 
no other revelation. Never darkened by sin, never 
overclouded with hereditary evil, it would receive the 
Divine light and reflect the Divine charms in child- 
like innocence, " lying in Abraham's bosom all the 
year." Nature would always be an open page, and 
matter always the true and living symbol of spirit ; 



168 THE NEW MAN. 

for the " vis fervida mentis," the God glowing 
within, would be an ever-present interpreter to show 
a divine meaning in the humblest things. We in- 
fer from the earliest records, that such were the reve- 
lations made to primitive man. He had none other, 
and he needed none. His was the innocence which 
had no knowledge of good and evil by sorrowful ex- 
perience, his the peace that had never been ruffled 
by sin. Consequently there was that constant reve- 
lation of God to man that comes through the inmost 
mind, and keeps it replenished with that mild wisdom 
w T hich is better than sagacity, and those intuitions 
which are a surer guide than philosophy. No theo- 
logians were needed for creed-making, no logicians 
to prove a future life, since the voice of the Lord 
God was always audible, and the soul itself was full 
of immortality. The imagination, unpolluted by 
the imagery of sinful passion, unoccupied by the 
phantasma of error, might furnish a white ground on 
which heavenly things would copy themselves, and 
might become the picture-gallery of the glories of a 
higher world. 

But when this state of innocence and purity is 
lost, the Divinity shines through our corruption with 
refracted and. broken rays. Other instincts stir 
within us, and other voices speak than those which 
come from God. Yea, a long line of foul ancestry 
is speaking through us, and pouring the tides of its 
perverted life through our bosoms, tending thence 
to darken and to sensualize the reason. Instinct is no 
longer a safe guide, intuition no longer a revelation. 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 169 

A man might take the combustion of his own pas- 
sions for the glow of the God within him, and his 
own wildering fancies for the Divine Reason. Thus 
left to the downward impulsions that move him from 
within, he might reach that state of desolation which 
the prophet describes when darkness is put for light 
and evil for good. " He feedeth on ashes ; a deceived 
heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his 
soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand ? " 
Then it is that a Divine Rule of life, external to him- 
self, becomes essential to his regeneration. He must 
have some sure standard out of himself by which all 
that is in him can be brought to the test. Hence 
another kind of revelation, one which comes from 
without, with those truths embodied and placed be- 
fore us which had been darkened in the chaos 
within. The first revelation comes in the spontane- 
ous workings of the faculties, and is the transfusion 
of heaven through the soul. The last comes through 
agencies external to ourselves, and lays a hand of 
authority upon us. It finds us in our defilement, in 
our gropings and wanderings ; it hedges us round 
with restraints, it holds up before us the truth which 
we had lost and were toiling after in vain, and guides 
us through the rugged path of self-denial to its in- 
ward possession again. Let those make impulse 
their only law whose impulsions are the sure 
promptings of the Divinity. Let them make the in- 
ner light their only guide, whose reason has had no 
mildew from earth-born sentiments, that is, in whom 
human nature preserves all its purity and symmetry. 

15 



170 THE NEW MAN. 

Those who know themselves know that their na- 
tures are no such media of Divine rays. 

Hence the necessity of a revelation to the out- 
ward man also ; and it must come down with its 
proofs as low as man has fallen. If he has fallen 
into sense, and become inlocked with sense, and 
shut in by his external perceptions, then the proofs 
of the revelation must come down into sense and find 
him there. Hence the Word made flesh attended 
with its signs in the natural world. Hence the Bible 
with its attestations of miracle, the embodiment of 
everlasting truth and of infallible rules for belief and 
practice. It comes at first, and commands us with 
the voice of God ; it is our master, and not our ser- 
vant ; it may even be a hard master, and place us in 
a severe and painful school. But it has this pecu- 
liar proof both of its infolded Divinity and its reno- 
vating power, — that, received at first upon simple 
external evidence, the evidence grows more and more 
internal, till its pages become magically self-lumi- 
nous. The path of self-denial into which it com- 
mands our roving feet, though at first steep and dif- 
ficult, proves afterwards, like Milton's path of educa- 
tional progress, " so smooth, so green, so full of goodly 
prospect, that the harp of Orpheus were not more 
charming." 

In asserting this necessity of a revelation from 
without, we are saying nothing in derogation of the 
revelation from within. We are simply stating the 
facts of history and consciousness, when we say that 
the latter became insufficient, by reason of human 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 171 

degeneracy. Not that these inward revealings en- 
tirely cease, or can cease ; for in that case the out- 
ward revelation would be of no avail. It is to 
clarify this inner light, to restore it to its ancient ef- 
fulgence, to afford an unerring standard by which to 
distinguish it from the nicker of strange fire within 
us, — it is for this that we have given us the Word 
written, and the Word made flesh. So, then, the 
unerring voice that speaks from the Bible interprets 
the voice that speaks in man, and distinguishes it 
from his own irregular frames and fancies, each har- 
monizing with the other, since each is a separate 
strain of the eternal melodies. 

The instrumentality of the Scriptures in the work 
of human regeneration becomes manifest. It is this 
which gave to Protestantism all its power over 
other communions, as the front phalanx in the 
world's progress. And because Protestantism would 
not trust to its own first principle, but fell to Ro- 
manizing, it split into jarring and counteracting 
forces. To come in free contact with human souls, 
and act on them as the supreme energy, and lift 
them up into its broad and warm effulgence, the 
Bible must be the sole divine creed of the individ- 
ual and the Church. Not until the inner revelation 
has been universally reproduced, must any body's 
interpretations of it come between the catechumen 
and his infallible guide. Not until truth is seen once 
more by intuitive beholding, and the outward revela- 
tion is superseded by the inward, can any commun- 
ion of believers accept an inferior rule. For then 



172 THE NEW MAN. 

they fall back into the same deadly peril that beset 
man before the revelation was received, that, namely, 
of mistaking human conceptions for the Divine rea- 
son, and human feelings and passions for the glow 
of God within. Because he was fallen, he needed 
a divine creed. Only because he is fallen, will he 
accept or impose any other. When intuition shall 
be unerring will human creeds become safe, and 
when they become safe they are useless. 

Disregarding these obvious principles, Protestant- 
ism let go the Bible as the sole standard by which 
we are to gauge our intuitive sentiments and elevat- 
ed private interpretations of the Bible in its place ; 
and straightway it fell asunder into a thousand little 
popedoms, and hence the j anglings of our Christian 
Babel. If its sects have attained to entire regenera- 
tion, (God help us if this chaos is such a state !) then, 
like man in Eden, they may dispense with creeds 
and Bibles together, since divine truth rewrites 
itself every day upon the heart. If they have not so 
attained, then their confessions are tinctured with 
the falsities of the natural man, and woe is to him 
who binds them about his neck, or writes them on 
the frontlets between his eyes. 

In using the Sacred Scriptures, therefore, as a 
means of self-knowledge and regeneration, two es- 
sential conditions will become obvious. One has 
reference to the authority with which they should be 
received, and the other to the order in which they 
should be studied. 

Their authority must be supreme and undivided. 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 173 

We come away from the popedoms with which 
Christendom is distracted, whether the greater or the 
less ones, lest we be left on the low level where they 
are. We rise out of hearing of these earthly noises* 
We enter that still region that " lies away from 
broils." We ascend the sacred mount and talk with 
God alone. We leave the formulas which have no 
warmth in their blood and no speculation in their 
eyes, and come before the majestic form and the 
bright countenance of Truth itself. We escape the 
temptations of those who bring down the text and 
make it tally with church creeds in order to escape 
church censure and excision. We avoid the guilt of 
the sects who break up the awful form of truth into 
fragments and divide it among themselves, parting 
its garments among them, and casting lots for its 
vesture. Two alternatives are presented to us in 
the present state of the Christian world, — either to 
bring down the Divine Word into our own service 
and that of our denomination, and so turn it to pri- 
vate or partial ends, or let that Word bring us up 
into its own region of light and peace, and transfig- 
ure us amid its splendors. We must choose the 
latter. 

Coming thus to the Divine Word, how or in what 
order shall we study it ? 

The Bible is a revelation from God, but it is not 
solely or even principally a revelation of God. It is 
also a revelation of man. Every possible condition 
of human nature is here painted in colors that live. 
All things pertaining to human experience, from the 

15* 



174 THE NEW MAN. 

grossest naturalism to the highest spiritualism, are 
here quarried and brought out to view. Experience 
what you will, you shall find your experience here. 
Let your deepest want become known to you, and 
when you open these pages you shall find that want 
sending up its prevailing cry. In the Psalms alone 
humanity articulates its whole range of sentiments 
through all their compass of tones. The life of the 
Saviour, from his lowest humiliation to his final glori- 
fication, is the history of every possible conflict between 
the good and the evil, with the ensuing victory and 
glory. It is the majestic epic of humanity, where 
every stage of its progress is divinely pictured forth. 
Even the mystical books are full of human nature. 
As the spirit- world is the scene where man's impris- 
oned powers are unlocked and set free, so a descrip- 
tion of that world is simply man opened. In the 
progress of our self-revealings we shall get a key to 
the sense of the Apocalypse itself. It is (we suggest) 
the inmost mind led forth on a theatre where there 
is no stint to its ongoings. Its gorgeous cloud- 
land is none other than man uncovered. The judg- 
ment day which the Scriptures describe does not 
reveal the wrath of God superimposed upon the crea- 
ture, but a development out of human nature, the 
unrolling of all its secrets into day. The Paradise 
of God, adorned with the tree of life, and threaded 
with streams of water, is not the sensual heaven of 
Orientalism, but rather the state wmere purified souls 
are surrounded with their own lovely creations. So 
we say, first, Divine revelation is a revelation of man, 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 175 

and according to his upward or downward tendencies 
it is an apocalypse of glory, or an apocalypse of woe. 

Then, again, it is a revelation of God. It is the 
Divine mind and will unveiled toward man. It is 
the Eternal Wisdom brought out to view in an all- 
harmonizing system of doctrines, calculated to touch 
man's palsied powers, and make them live again. 
It is infinite truth unrolled in its order to the eye 
and the intellect, which else had been apprehended 
by an inward sense, and been perceived by intuitive 
beholding. So that the life of God and the life of 
man are both revealed here, — the former acting 
upon the latter, seeking to purify it and bring it 
into harmony with itself. The Bible, therefore, is 
an exhibition of the things hidden within us, — hid- 
den often far beneath the reach of our conscious- 
ness. Deep in our souls there are the same two- 
fold forces, — the Divine life and the human, with 
their strivings and interactions ; only, as we be- 
come degenerate and live chiefly in externals, these 
things within us are seen dimly or not at all ; but 
the Bible holds them up before us again on a page 
that is open and illumined. 

All this suggests to us the way and the order in 
which the Scriptures should be used and studied, as 
aids in our regeneration. We may read them only 
in the order of chapter and verse, with a whole 
lumber-house of commentaries to help us, and yet 
know little or nothing of what is in them. We 
should read them in the order of our own experi- 
ences and needs. These are developed in succession 



176 THE NEW MAN. 

as we advance in the life of regeneration. Divine 
Providence, whenever we give ourselves into his 
hands like little children, leads us along through the 
circuit of our self-revealings, so as to make us feel 
each in its time our inmost needs, and that drawing 
of the Holy Spirit towards those truths by which 
these needs shall be satisfied. For this reason the 
word of God is called bread, water, implying that it 
is to be sought for when we hunger and when we 
thirst. It has doctrines adapted to every possible 
change of our life, and themes which at special 
times are urged upon us with special power, and 
hold our attention awake. If we seek it for the 
sole end of self-purification, searching for the truth 
which our present condition requires and our nature 
craves, we shall be drawn to the pages where that 
truth waits for us, and it shall rise on our vision 
with clearer and clearer blaze, as the astronomer 
sought the new planet, and wept for joy when it 
crossed over the glass. For the Bible being a reve- 
lation of humanity, every aspect of it, as it changes 
from shade into light, is painted with the Divine 
pencil upon its leaves. Every needful doctrine will 
meet us at every new stage, and when we have 
turned it into conduct, another will rise on our 
sight. And so star after star will come down into 
our sky, and Christianity be given to us as an ever- 
unfolding system, its doctrines pouring on our path 
their blending and beautiful rays. 

We will now illustrate by three specifications the 
value of this mode of using the Divine oracles. 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 177 

Perhaps the first question which an earnest mind 
is called to grapple with, is the question of innate 
depravity. As a question of speculative theology, 
presented to us from without, it may be settled any 
way by reading works on original sin or the dignity 
of man, according as one's fancies or ecclesiastical 
relations may happen to be. But let the question 
come up from within, and press for an answer till 
it hinders us from sleep. It comes sooner or later 
to almost every one not utterly lost in worldliness ; 
sometimes in vague dissatisfactions with present at- 
tainment; sometimes in longings after peace; some- 
times in the unrealized anticipations of our dream- 
ing childhood, when the dews that sparkled on the 
foliage in the first golden light have all disappeared, 
and naught remains but the sweat and heat and 
burden of the day ; sometimes in the avenging con- 
sciousness of God's inly pervading and broken laws. 
Now if the inquirer settles this question by the 
" standard works " or the popular preachers of his 
church, he will most assuredly fall into the ruts of 
some provincial theology, and follow the unceasing 
round of its creaking wains. But if he comes free- 
ly and freshly to the Divine "Word, with an earnest 
beseeching that his own heart may be unveiled, he 
will find that word quick and powerful, shooting 
darts of light through the deepest places of his soul. 
There are two classes of passages where the whole 
matter of human nature and human wants is treated 
at large. There is the narrative portion and the 
ethical. In the former, man is revealed historically 



178 



THE NEW MAN. 



and experimentally ; in the latter, by that divine logic 
which pierces the heart and rends its gauzy sophis- 
tries away. There is everywhere a basis of fact, 
and on this basis rests the work of divine argumen- 
tation. Large portions of the Old Testament are 
human nature exposed. The Psalms are its deep, 
spontaneous utterances. In the New we see it 
wrestling with its foes in the desert of temptation, 
or bending low under its sorrowful burden in the 
shades of the garden. As specimens of the ethical 
portion, take the Sermon on the Mount, the discourse 
with Nicodemus, or Paul's delineation of the higher 
and lower nature. And everywhere, out of heaven 
and out of Christ, are revealings of the Divine na- 
ture, giving us gleams of an untold and unimagined 
purity that pierce the darkness of our hearts and 
make the darkness visible. 

Another question is sure to arise, and another want 
is sure to be felt, — that of atonement for sin. When 
this question comes up from without, men invent 
theories of the Divine government and go off into 
endless logomachies. When it comes up from with- 
in, and urges us to the Divine record, we find our 
deepest experience arrayed before us, and the truth 
that speaks to. our condition. There is the narrative 
of the coming, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and 
glorification of the Son of Man, and his second com- 
ing as the Comforter, to suffuse the penitent heart 
with the sweet elixir of peace, — a constellation of 
truths under whose guidance we cannot miss our 
way. Then the ethics of the subject of atonement 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 179 

are set forth in the parable of the prodigal, — itself 
a comprehensive and lovely theology. The facts of 
our consciousness are here drawn out in the clearest 
array. Every step of our progress from the city of 
Destruction to the city of God is here mapped out 
before us. Here is our fall and desolation. Here 
is repentance, conversion, and reconciliation, when 
we come home again, and the father embraces and 
kisses his child, and puts the best robe upon him, 
— even as the great Father gives to his renewed 
and reconciled children the clothing of new and 
heavenly moralities. 

There are seasons when the themes of immortality 
come home to our bosoms in such shapes that they 
will not away at our bidding. When the chair is 
vacant, and the chamber is still, and affection is 
weeping at the bier, we dread the mockery of delu- 
sions. We want realities. 

It will be obvious, on a moment's thought, how 
closely this subject connects itself with human na- 
ture and human redemption, and that to reveal man 
here is to reveal his state hereafter. When we form 
to ourselves artificial theories spun from the meta- 
physics of the Church, we do not lay hold of the 
life to come, nor see the sublime pneumatology 
which the Bible unfolds. To open man's book of 
life, is to break the seals from the word. If heaven 
and hell are not arbitrary appointments, but man 
uncovered, and his powers led out and dramatized 
on an ampler field, then our souls are openings into 
another world, and from this outlook we see adown 



180 THE NEW MAN. 

the long avenues, and their solemn forms come 
before us as in a mystic glass. Let this subject 
come up in its order, after human nature with its 
deep-working laws has been revealed to us, and a 
" theory of the future life " based on indubitable fact 
would be developed ; the letter of Scripture would 
shine white as the light, bursting with the revealing 
mysteries of an hereafter. False and artificial the- 
ories of man connect themselves indissolubly with 
false and artificial theories of a future life, for the 
future life is in fact our present life concealed and 
folded up. The land of immortality becomes base- 
less and spectral. The beings with which the tech- 
nical theologies have peopled it, are any thing but 
men and women. No wonder the question is anx- 
iously raised, " Shall we know our friends hereaf- 
ter ? " "Who could recognize among those winged 
and shadowy beings " the old, familiar faces " ? 

We are burdened with a sense of the importance 
of the theme we are handling, so deep, that we fail 
to transfer it to our pages. We believe that all our 
costly apparatus of interpretation does little more 
as yet than touch the letter of the Divine volume, 
but that its spirit is yet to break upon us as never 
before, and that the day which Robinson foresaw is 
yet to dawn. For thickly as the theologians have 
woven their web around this book, like the silk- 
worm spinning her threads, " till she clouds herself 
all o'er," yet even now, when touched with reverent 
hand, there come sparkles from its muffled truths, 
as from jars surcharged with electric fire. The 



ANOTHER BOOK OPENED. 181 

wants of these times urge us to seek with fresh dili- 
gence, and with new preparation of heart, the re- 
sponses of the sacred oracles. Let us leave the 
sects in the oblivious past. At least let us get out 
of these prisons, into which light comes in scant 
allowance, and only through stained glass. With 
all our varied culture, our systems of education and 
our popular literature, still comes the question from 
earnest and famished natures, Who will show us 
any good ? They go to this and that gathering for 
social stimulus ; to " popular preachers," who out of 
their own eloquence and ingenuity attempt to sup- 
ply food for the soul, and still the soul hungers and 
thirsts. Commentators attempt to open the Divine 
Word, but it will not open at their bidding. They 
smite the rock, but still the soul hungers and thirsts. 
Each sect sets forth its manuals of doctrine, and 
makes out its case, but still there is a waiting and 
a pause. We have religious excitements, and ma- 
chinery to keep them up. Those that work the ma 
chinery get out of breath, and then it stops, and there 
is a waiting and a pause. Some go back to Rome 
for rest and shelter, " like a child seeking nourishment 
and repose on the cold bosom of its dead mother." 
All the while, the book out of which light is to 
come lies upon our shelves, — ready to yield its rev- 
elations, not to some costly apparatus of interpreters, 
but to the humble and seeking mind ; ready to give 
light when restored to its ancient authority in the 
Church, and the usurping creeds of the logomachists 
are taken away. Let the inquirer forsake these, 

16 



182 THE NEW MAN. 

and steal an hour every day from the literature that 
surfeits, but does not satisfy and save. And when 
the greatproblems of life and destiny come up each 
in its turn, and press painfully upon him, let him 
not give over till the truth stands clear to the intel- 
lect, and through that pours a mellow sunshine into 
his soul. Then the truth lost shall emerge anew and 
become intuition again. Then the inner folds of the 
heart shall be laid open, ere come the solemn dis- 
closures of the judgment time. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CONFLICT AND VICTOEY. 



u The language of the Bible harmonizes with all human experience, in declaring 
that all progress implies effort, resistance, combat ; — but there are intervals of 
peace, — intervals when the battle of that day is won and the wearied soldier rests 
and rejoices ; intervals when the climbing pilgrim has reached a mountain-top, and 
while he breathes the sweet freshness of the air, he looks back upon his nights of 
darkness and his days of toil, and around upon a world now glowing with beauty be- 
cause the love that fills it is for that hour unveiled, and upward to a sky from which 
the clouds have melted or else give back the sunshine in golden light, and forward 
to the distant and loftier summits where peace has a more abiding home." — Par- 
sons's Essays. 



We have described the antagonistic forces which 
straggle for the possession of human nature. There 
is hereditary evil, with its passions and its brood of 
lies. There is the effluent Spirit of God always 
immanent in human nature, always claiming it as 
his own province of light and love. There is the 
uprising world of darkness, with all its tempting 
fiends ; there are the bending heavens, with their 
guardian angels ; and the field of conflict is the soul 
of man. The alternations of defeat and victory, un- 
til the final catastrophe takes place, constitute the 
solemn drama of humanity. Mankind in all ages 
have been conscious of this conflict, and the highest 
achievement which any nation's literature hath ever 



184 THE NEW MAN. 

made, has been worthily to conceive and picture 
it forth. One of the oldest poems in Hindoo litera- 
ture is a noble epic which sets forth in mythical 
form this sacred war. God becomes incarnate in 
order to combat the kingdom of evil, whose genii 
were overrunning the kingdom of light, and the 
Christian reader is startled as he goes along, to find 
Christian ideas antedating the greater portion of 
his own Bible, and warming and inspiring the oldest 
profane literature in the world.* With this conflict 
Divine revelation opens, and with this it closes. 
The conflict begins amid the blooming scenery of 
Eden, and it winds up in the gorgeous visions of 
St. John. Almost every book describes an act in 
this fearful drama. In man's deepest consciousness, 
read sometimes clearly and sometimes dimly, is 
the subject-matter of a Paradise Lost and a Para- 
dise Regained, which the seers and bards of human- 
ity have struggled to articulate distinctly in proph- 
ecy and song. Only when the things of immortality 
become mere matters of tradition, and not subjec- 
tive realities, man conceives this drama as enacted 
in some far off and imaginary heavens, and not 
where alone it can be found, — in himself. 

This drama has a twofold catastrophe, for either 
of these powers may be victorious. If we welcome 
the powers of light and cooperate with them, their 
dominion enlarges till it comprehends our entire 
nature. All evil powers are driven out, all corrupt 

* Heeren's Asia. See his critique upon the Ramayana. 



CONFLICT AND VICTORY. 185 

proclivities cease. The conflict is over and the issue 
is peace. Or we may side with the evil forces, and 
then their victory will be sure. Not all at once, for 
the mind still opens inward towards a brighter 
sphere, and receding voices for a long time will talk 
along the avenues. But a necessity lies upon every 
man either to obey the truth or else reject it ; for if 
not obeyed, it fills the soul with torturing memories, 
and gives a foresight of retribution until its light is 
is excluded. The spirit that speaks within must 
either be obeyed or " grieved " away. Therefore all 
selfish and sinful indulgence, all worldly living, is the 
coming on of the shadows of night. God and immor- 
tality become the traditions, if not the fables, of olden 
time. The world of spirit is shadowy and phan- 
tasmic, while the world of sense is solid and real. 
Towards God and the things that are above, the 
mind is darkened and closed. Towards sense and 
things below, with all their sorceries and seductions, 
the mind is alive and open wide. The evil powers 
are victorious, and the issue is religious insensibility 
and spiritual death. " They make a solitude and 
they call it peace." 

The path of our regenerate life, therefore, is the 
strait and climbing and rugged pathway of Chris- 
tian obedience. When once our book of life has 
been opened to us, every evil disposition that stirs 
within us is to be resisted, mortified, and slain. As 
fast as the old man is crucified, the new man is put 
on. Every lust that is denied, is driven out by " the 
expulsive power of a new affection." As fast as the 

16* 



186 THE NEW MAN. 

kingdom of darkness recedes, the kingdom of light 
comes on. This is not the sole work of the closet 
or the Sabbath day. In our daily walk, in our 
minutest affairs, are the occasions found when the 
temptation without brings to light the evil within, 
and they call and answer to each other. Then the 
evil stands out naked and undisguised, and we 
grapple with it on a fair and open field. Thus all 
the desires of the natural man " come full circle," 
are successively denied and repressed, and the cor- 
responding dispositions of the spiritual man beam 
forth in the most external life, and clothe themselves 
in new and heavenly moralities. Every temptation 
resisted is a defeat of the powers of evil, and every 
such defeat makes our next victory more certain 
and easy. And when our most unremembered deeds 
are redolent of spontaneous and angel sympathies, 
God reigns in our most external as well as our most 
internal man. He is first, and he is last. He 
reigns in our central being, and in its remotest cir- 
cuit, and therefore in all that interspaces these two. 
But the work is not complete so long as any combi- 
nation of circumstances can stir a passion within 
us which is to be denied and crucified. 

This conflict between the passions of the natural 
man and the angel band of pure affections, between 
self and God struggling for supremacy in the soul, is 
such, that the perturbations are sometimes long and 
fearful, and the soul seems to itself to be driven to 
and fro on the billows of an angry sea. It may even 
be such, that this subjective world of contending 



CONFLICT AND VICTORY. 187 

forces may fling the shadows of its own shapes upon 
outward things, and the individual shall see out of 
him an image of the warfare that rages within. 
Luther's temptations were of this kind, when the 
fiend that first took shape and consistence in his own 
passions seemed to pass into objectivity, and fling 
his grim shadows upon the wall. Bunyan's temp- 
tations passed into this stage, when the calls and 
responses between the tempter without and the evil 
within were so loud and strong, that some one seemed 
to be sending his voice after him, and he would look 
round and say, Who calls? And again the deep 
waking voices of God's spirit were so distinct and 
clear, that they seemed as articulate and audible as 
if they fell on the outward ear.* So the strength 
that comes to us during the struggle may be such, 
and the peace of victory won may be so clear-shining 
and heavenly, that they shall seem to fling their 
splendors into the external world, and overlay the ap- 
pearances of the senses. Thus in the darkest Geth- 
semanes of life the angel may appear from heaven 
to strengthen the sufferer, and when the tempter is 
driven away and the struggle is over, the sunshine 
that follows may be the brightness flung from the 
wings of seraphim. That is a shallow philosophy, 
and one whose plummet never sounded the deeps of 
humanity, which ascribes all this to fantasy, and then 
thinks the mystery explained. For such are the 
openings of the internal mind towards a spirit-realm, 

* See Bunyan's Life, prefixed to Pilgrim's Progress. 



188 THE NEW MAN. 

that natures extremely susceptible shall not only re- 
ceive its influences, but, in moments of intense men- 
tal action, have its images formed in their percep- 
tions ; and then the great conflict on which hang such 
momentous issues, the conflict of the good with the 
evil, the true with the false, is shadowed forth ex- 
ternally, and the moral battle paints itself upon the 
canvas of the senses. 

Fortunately, however, most men have not these ex- 
tremely, susceptible natures, and corrupt inclinations 
may be denied, as they come successively into the 
consciousness, without these violent perturbations. 
The path of our regeneration is open and plain. 
It is simple self-denial, until there is no self to be 
denied. This is never accomplished without pain- 
ful vigils and struggles, and persevering toil, how- 
ever smoothly our external affairs may flow on. 
There are those of ripe experience, of high Christian 
attainment, of that heavenly-mindedness which is al- 
ways serene and unclouded as the upper sky. But 
all this did not come of itself. Always when the 
internal experience of such persons is disclosed to us, 
we find that they reached those summits of peace 
through conflicts and watchings, that sometimes 
chased repose from their pillows. There are those 
with whom this work begins with the first dawn- 
ings of reason, — who, like Samuel, hear the voice of 
the Lord in childhood, and follow it devoutly, — who 
never suffer inborn corruption to come forth into 
voluntary life, — who therefore need not be converted 
in order to be regenerated and saved ; but whose 



CONFLICT AND VICTORY. 189 

characters grow into forms of Christian piety and 
grace, as the palm-tree ries graceful and majestic 
amid the stillness of the forest. With them the 
struggle is less severe ; every victory is easy, and 
their Christian course is a continuous ovation. Con- 
science always obeyed becomes unerring and clear, 
sweeter to hear than a song at evening, its voice a 
constant " Well done ! " from the indwelling Spirit of 
God. If there is any thing in the universe fitted to 
awaken emotions of the morally sublime and beau- 
tiful, like this unfolding of childhood into the con- 
scientious young man or woman, we do not know 
what it is, — childhood leading a charmed life, walk- 
ing through the furnace while the flames play innocu- 
ous around. We may find its image and representa- 
tion in nature, but we can find nothing half so lovely. 
I have seen the planet of evening, when her disc was 
nearly obscure, — " the new moon with the old 
moon in her arm," — and she seemed little else than 
a dark mass hanging in the sky. But she turns 
towards the sun, and a brighter crescent appears ; it 
grows larger and encroaches upon the line of dark- 
ness, till she emerges complete in light, and rides in 
full beauty along the plains of heaven. Such is 
childhood emerging out of hereditary corruption, not 
through the spasms and agonies of repentance and 
conversion, but through growth in that grace that 
never fails, but always enlarges till it comprehends 
the whole man, and he reflects the Divine light and 
the Divine charms in complete beauty and glory. 
But it is the shame of our Christian education and 



190 THE NEW MAN. 

Christian example, that there are few such cases as 
these. The way of our regeneration lies through 
bitter repentances and death-struggles for victory, 
and perhaps at the end of our mortal course we find 
the victory but half gained. And yet we would not rep- 
resent that the Christian life is only a life of struggle. 
There are intervals of sunshine and peace, when we 
rest upon our arms and contemplate the fields we 
have won, and the affluent dominions we are yet to 
gain. The region of eternal rest is not reached 
through a path of incessant upward toil. "We go 
from one height to another, as hills rise above hills, 
and on every height gained we enjoy its partial 
peace, and in our breathing-time we sing victorious 
songs. There are seasons when our wrong propen- 
sities are quiescent, and we rest from our labor until 
temptation wakes them up and the conflict begins 
anew. And when one of these enemies is destroyed, 
we have the peace of victory till another comes in 
sight, all the while rejoicing in our faith in Him who 
is our shield and buckler, and who gives us at these 
intervals the earnest of everlasting rest. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE MEDIATOR 

" The few pale stars had vanished from the sky ; 
There was no moon, but blackness oyer all 
Dense as the cloak of death, without relief, 
Or hope of change, — a visible despair : 
Then the retiring darkness gave to view 
A lucid sphere enveloped in the gloom ; 
Sudden, effulgent, glorious, it burst, 
As if a sun were born at midnight deep. 
Radius-like bent round the brow of Christ 
It shone, the promised dat-speing from on high." 

The theology of the New Testament involves 
three leading ideas, all of which centre in the person 
of Jesus Christ. 

First, there is a perfect and glorified human na- 
ture, exhibiting in its changes from its humiliation 
to its exaltation all the possible virtues, graces, and 
excellences that belong to our human condition. 

Secondly, there is the Divine nature in its pater- 
nal benignity, infinite wisdom, and universal and 
unchanging love, contrasting with the dark and 
partial conceptions of God which prevailed among 
Jews and Gentiles. 

Thirdly, there is the union of these two in Jesus 
Christ, so that in him are revealed at the same time 
a perfect humanity and the all-perfect Divinity. 



192 THE NEW MAN. 

All classes of Christians receive these three ideas, 
though not in the same combinations. All believe 
that the New Testament reveals the perfect man. 
All believe that it reveals the perfect God, the Uni- 
versal Father. All believe that in Jesus Christ God 
and humanity were united. It is when they come 
to discuss the mode of this connection, whether by 
inspiration, by indwelling, or by hypostatic union, 
that differences begin to appear. We are not going 
to follow out these subtilties. " That way madness 
lies." 

Keeping close to our main purpose, however, 
and hoping to draw the reader along with us, we 
premise that it is no example of mere human na- 
ture, however sublimated and exalted, that satisfies 
our wants as sinful men. No finite power and in- 
fluence can create, us anew. No models of human 
virtue, however pure and perfect, are to regenerate 
and save us. Rather do they dazzle and mock us 
with ideals which we can never realize ourselves. 
I may fix on them my earnest and despairing gaze ; 
but there aloft they shine and shine in vain, giving 
me gleams of a region of purity and peace which I 
cannot climb to, and which fall upon my unsunned 
and frozen nature like the shimmer of moonbeams 
upon a mass of snow. Christ has placed before me 
an example of human perfection, and told me to 
follow in his steps. And is that all ? If that be all, 
it were like standing on the shore and helping a 
drowning man by merely shouting to him to rise 
and walk the waves. In our fallen, sinful state, it is 



THE MEDIATOR. 193 

not first and chiefly an example that we want. We 
want God. We want Divine succor and influence, 
coming within us with creative power, not primarily 
to bring us into conformity with some model that is 
placed before us, but to revive the Divine image 
within us, so that by its own radiation it shall pro- 
duce around us the halo of all Christian virtues and 
graces. 

Whatever, then, may be the mode of union be- 
tween the human and the Divine in the person and 
history of Jesus Christ, — and we shrink from ap- 
plying the scalpel of our metaphysics to the Divine 
nature, — this one truth stands bold and prominent 
in the entire history of the incarnation, that the 
human was so overlaid, controlled, and possessed by 
the Divine, that the Saviour is without reserve " God 
with us." The Divine inlays all his words and ac- 
tions, so that they are the undoubted expositions of 
the Eternal Wisdom and Love. The New Testa- 
ment writers are careful to inform us that the man 
Christ Jesus had no human father, but that the Holy 
Spirit itself descended into this world and took its 
normal clothing of flesh and blood and its expres- 
sion in the human form. They put this fact in the 
foreground of the Christian theology, for by this 
fact they make the Author of Christianity not an 
inspired prophet, but a Divine Man. The prophet 
is inspired to utter his message, and that done he is 
like other men. Christ was not inspired after birth, 
but the effluence of the Divine nature formed the in- 
most principle of his natural being, so that his most 

17 



194 THE NEW MAN. 

common words and works had their grouri d. in the 
ingenerating Divinity. The natural life of Christ 
became hence the expression of God, and the influ- 
ence proceeding from him the effusion of the Holy 
Spirit. 

St. John asserts the same truth in describing the 
Divine Word made flesh, that is, brought down into 
the conditions of mortal existence and clothed in hu- 
man form. He is asserting the ground of Christ's 
plenary authority and wisdom, and this he does by 
describing these fleshly surroundings as enfolding the 
Divine wisdom, life within life, — the infinite become 
visible in the finite, not by being superinduced upon 
Christ by special gift, but by forming the inmost prin- 
ciple of his natural being. Nothing less than this 
satisfies the record of the supernatural conception by 
Matthew, or of the Divine incarnation by John. In- 
deed, these two chapters aside, nothing short of the 
fact which they describe explains that phenomenal 
Divine life which the whole history of Jesus brings to 
view. Both his words and his works are quite in- 
explicable without it. " He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father, and how sayest thou then, Show us 
the Father ? " " The words which I speak unto you 
I speak not of myself, but the Father that dwelleth 
in me, he doeth the works." The finite human na- 
ture received from Mary was obsequious to the in- 
most Divinity, was its living transparency which 
served to symbolize and copy it out. 

Without attempting, therefore, any rigid or exact 
analysis, in which we might perhaps lose the com- 



THE MEDIATOR. 195 

pany of the reader, we trust that he will approach 
with us in reverent mood the sublime and central 
truth to which we are coming. We lay off all the 
theories of the schoolmen pertaining to the mode 
of union between God and Christ. We forget all 
the disputes of the sects upon this question. We 
recognize the fact that such a union, though it may 
involve mysteries, involves no contradictions. We 
do not stop at what is mortal and finite in the fact 
of the Divine incarnation ; we do not even see the 
finite, but look through it as we look through glass 
to see the sun ; and then the Divine nature unveils 
itself to our longing vision, and out of Jesus Christ 
comes the unclouded blaze of the Godhead!* 

The practical bearing of this truth on the state of 
the world and the regeneration of man soon becomes 
obvious. It is obvious in many respects, but prin- 
cipally from the fact of a new dispensation of the 
Spirit through the Mediator. Taking the fact 

* We are confident that we have here stated substantially the doc- 
trine, not only of the New Testament writers, but of the ante-Nicene 
fathers and the Nicene Council itself, concerning the nature of Christ. 
The modern doctrine of a distinction of persons in the Godhead did 
not enter at all into the Arian controversy. That was the invention of 
a later age. The question between Arius and his opposers was, 
whether Christ is begotten out of God, and therefore 6/ioov(nos< 
consubstantial with the Father, or whether he was formed out of noth- 
ing by the creative power of God. Arius affirmed the latter doctrine. 
His opposers the former. The Nicene Council decided against Arius, 
and (as we think) in accordance with the New Testament writers, es- 
pecially Matthew, Luke, and John, in their introductory chapters. See 
Murdock's Mosheim, Vol. I. pp. 287 - 290. Also Stuart's article on 
Sabellianism in the Biblical Repository. 



196 THE NEW MAN. 

which three of the Evangelists have placed so conspic- 
uously in the foreground of their history, that Jesus 
Christ was begotten of the Holy Spirit, which thus 
became the inmost principle of his natural being, it 
would hence result that the influence emanating 
from him is the Holy Spirit itself. And this truth 
shines with great fulness through all the narrative 
that follows. It was conspicuous at his baptism. 
The Evangelist evidently does not mean to say that 
the natural heavens were opened, and that the sym- 
bolic dove descended out of them. Rather does he 
mean that the heavens opened from within ; their 
light streaming outward and investing the person of 
the Son of God with their encircling glory, in which 
glory were seen to play the wings of the holy dove, 
emblem of that Holy Spirit which, from being the 
inmost principle of his nature, was becoming also 
its outermost manifestation, its Last as well as First. 
In that memorable discourse of Jesus with his 
disciples at the table of the last supper, he promises 
to send them the Comforter, " whom," he adds, 
" the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, 
neither knoweth him. But ye know him ; for he 
dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." The 
Comforter is synonymous with the Holy Spirit. It 
dwelt with the disciples in the person of the Son of 
God, but not yet had it penetrated the darkness of 
their minds. Not yet had the world recognized its 
presence, immersed in its superstitions and idolatries. 
But this Holy Spirit was to come to them with 
other demonstrations than those made through its 



THE MEDIATOR. 197 

fleshly coverings. One of the grand results which 
the death of Christ was to accomplish, was to bring 
the Holy Ghost by taking away the hiding of its 
power. The interposition of a mortal body between 
the spiritual Christ and his followers, was as a cloud 
that concealed the sun and intercepted its rays. 
The Comforter was with them, but not in them. 
He had unfolded to them an infinite system of truth, 
but its doctrines lay cold and dead in their memo- 
ries. The seed had been deposited in the soil, but 
not yet had come the warm sunshine and the spring 
gales. 

The import of our Saviour's language afterwards 
to his disciples hence becomes apparent. " It is ex- 
pedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, 
the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, 
I will send him unto you." * As if he had said, 
" Though I am with you in this mortal body, yet I 
am separated from you. I withdraw from your 
sight, that I may get nearer to your spirit. I can 
come to you out of the immortal state, and out of 
my glorified body, as I cannot come to you out of 
these environments of mortality." This is the reason 
why the Holy Ghost was not given before Jesus was 
glorified.^ Out of the material body and through 
the clogs of the senses, the influences that came 
from Jesus did not reach the inmost hearts of his 
followers ; but these clogs being removed, and com- 
ing to his disciples from the spiritual side, those in- 



John xri. 7. t John vii. 39. 

17* 



198 THE NEW MAN. 

fluences might be felt with new demonstrations of 
power. Such was the promise made by Christ to his 
disciples, — the promise of a new gift of the Holy 
Spirit: — " I go away that I may come again." 

How wonderful was the fulfilment ! At the first 
meeting of the Saviour with his disciples, after his 
death and resurrection, the Evangelist says, " lie 
breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye 
the Holy Ghost." But the fulfilment is witnessed in 
its most memorable results about forty days after his 
crucifixion, namely, at the Feast of Pentecost. The 
disciples had assembled with vague anticipations 
of the promised gift. At length the influence came. 
Their souls are suddenly swept by the breezes of 
God's spirit, which elevated all their powers of con- 
ception, emotion, and utterance. The truths that 
lay cold in their memories now glow like living 
coals, reminding them of the promise that the Com- 
forter should " bring all things to their remem- 
brance." Those timid men, who forsook their Master 
at the cross, now confront danger and death with 
loosened tongues, and with tidings of a world's sal- 
vation. But the gift is not to the disciples alone; 
it is the inheritance of the rising Church, and its 
first day's evidence is the conversion of three thou- 
sand souls. " This Jesus," exclaims Peter in the 
midst of this triumphal scene, " hath God raised up, 
whereof we are all witnesses ; and having received 
of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, lie 
hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear" 

May we not pause here a moment, and contemplate 



THE MEDIATOR. 199 

the summit of Calvary as a scene of triumph ! The 
enemies of the Saviour thought they were taking 
the most potent means to cover him with defeat 
and ruin. They were the very means he had taken 
into his plan of success and victory. They thought 
that, by killing the body and putting it out of sight, 
this new religion would be swept from the earth. 
He knew that, when free of the body, he should 
have access to the minds of his followers by means 
more efficacious than those of language. They 
thought that, when the body was bruised in pieces, 
all was at an end. He knew that this was tearing 
away the chief hindrance of his power. They 
thought that, by killing the body, they put Christ 
out of the way. He knew that this would bring 
him more completely into the midst of his disciples, 
yea, into the heart of humanity, as that power which 
should shake down old dynasties and change the 
face of the world. 

We come now to a clear apprehension of the 
meaning of Paul, in that large class of passages in 
which he ascribes so much efficacy to the influence 
of the living Christ. It is a most remarkable fact, 
that, while the modern Church ascribes the chief effi- 
cacy in man's redemption to the death of Christ, 
Paul ascribes it to his life and resurrection. " If 
Christ be not raised, your faith is vain ; ye are 
yet in your sins" His sufferings and death are of 
no avail to cancel your sins, except as a means of 
exaltation to that sphere, whence his spirit operates 
with new power in cleansing your sins away. Again : 



200 THE NEW MAN. 

" If, while we were yet sinners, we were reconciled 
to God by the death of his Son, much more, being 
reconciled, we shall be saved by his life." * And 
yet again he speaks of " Christ that died " ; but 
checking himself, " yea, rather, that is risen again, 
and who maketh intercession for us." f We may 
well stand with dissolving hearts in view of the 
spectacle on Calvary. But our repentance were " a 
most unprevailing woe," were it not that, from the 
heavens to which Christ is exalted, the life of God 
out of his glorified humanity passes daily into our 
hearts to create them anew. The Apostle thus 
makes the resurrection of Christ the fundamental 
doctrine of the gospel system : " If thou shalt con- 
fess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in 
thy heart that God raised him from the dead, thou 
shalt be saved." $ The Apostle most clearly does 
not mean, by the resurrection of Christ, the reanima- 
tion of the natural body. He means that whole 
process through which he ascended out of mortality 
into the glorified state. He means by it the putting 
off of these limitations of flesh and sense, and the 
putting on of that spiritual form in which he came 
anew to his disciples, and " shed forth " the Holy 
Ghost into his. rising Church and into the hearts of 
all his followers. And when he describes the Christ 
of consciousness, the Christ that is " formed within 
us," we do not understand him to be using language 
idly and vaguely. Rather does he describe that im- 



Eom. v. 10. t Ibid. viii. 34. J Ibid. x. 9. 



THE MEDIATOR. 201 

age of Christ formed in the Christian heart by those 
rays of Divine light that fall into it out of the glori- 
fied nature of the great Redeemer. 

We would not by any means deny the influences 
that come to us from the life of Christ in the flesh, 
or his death on Calvary, considered as an example 
of sublime virtue and majestic patience. Doubtless 
we are guided by looking at that example. Doubt- 
less, by a contemplation of that great sacrifice, that 
all-consecrating devotion of the outward and the finite 
to the God within, we get the lesson of self-conse- 
cration, and learn how we ought to live. Doubtless, 
the sweet, forgiving spirit, which at the crucifixion 
beamed out through the convulsions of nature, like 
sunbeams struggling through the cloud and fringing 
the wings of the storm, has found its way into 
many hearts in hours of tender communion. But 
if Christ had not been raised, we had been " yet in 
our sins." His death is efficacious as the rending 
away of that veil which hung between him and the 
hearts of men, as breaking down the chief obstacle 
in the way of pouring his life in warm, full tides 
into the bosom of humanity. Paul, had he seen 
Christ in the flesh only, would perhaps have joined 
hands with his murderers. But when he saw him 
amid the revealing glories of another sphere, he was 
smitten to the earth, and cried, " Lord, what wilt 
thou have me to do ? " And though no such vis- 
ion was given to all the disciples, yet not less 
was his Divine Person close to them, insphering 
them in its own life and light, whose influence, 



202 THE NEW MAN. 

breathing through the soul, was everywhere felt as 
the gales of this spring-time of Christianity. 

The history of the first triumphs of the gospel 
is entirely inexplicable on any ordinary principles, 
and might well baffle a profounder man than Mr. 
Gibbon. Put yourself in the presence of these early 
preachers, and witness the results ! Some reasoners 
have attempted to account for the rapid spread of 
Christianity in those times, by the power which the 
first disciples had of working miracles, — such as 
healing the sick, raising the dead, and the like. Let 
any such reasoner read the Acts of the Apostles in 
reference to this matter, and he will find the facts 
against him. A few plain men, with their simple 
message, begin to speak to men more rude than 
themselves, immersed in the night of paganism. 
Almost at the name of Jesus of Nazareth, new emo- 
tions rush through their hearts, and new conceptions 
rise in their minds, and go forth into spontaneous 
utterance, as from tongues that are tipped with fire.* 
The Holy Ghost " fell on them that heard the word," 
so that these preachers were themselves " astonished" 
at that hidden power in whose motions the wills 
of men were swayed like reeds that bend before the 
wind. It was obvious throughout, that a sphere of 
Divine Life had come nearer to the earth, and through 
Christianity was touching the human will ; and when 
the veil of sense was rolled away, as it sometimes 
was, and these men were permitted to have gleams 

* See Acts x. 44-47. 



THE MEDIATOR. 203 

of the new agencies that were moving upon human 
nature, they saw the glorified form of the risen 
Christ, out of which came shafts of Divine fire. 
Such was the introversion of the dying Stephen, of 
the persecuting Saul, and of the prophet of Patmos, 
into that sphere whose radiances were piercing the 
consciousness of men and infusing unwonted ener- 
gies. The miraculous works which attended the 
first spread of Christianity were not so much causes 
as effects, being demonstrations into the sphere of 
sense and matter of a power that was shaking the 
inner sphere of thought and will, and turning its 
ancient foundations out of course. 

We regard this new spiritual influence as the 
peculiar inheritance of the Christian Church. It was 
not the first disciples alone who were brought into 
this peculiar relation to the risen Lord. " The prom- 
ise is unto you and your children, and to all that 
are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God 
shall call." 4 That the promise made by Jesus to 
be with his people " always, even to the end of the 
world," is of the same import as the promise made 
to the twelve to come to them again as the Com- 
forter, is, we think, quite evident, both from the terms 
of the promise, and from its fulfilment in the course 
of Christian history. It is this new dispensation of 
the Holy Spirit, which makes Christianity the sov- 
ereign energy in renovating society, and changing 
the condition of mankind. Other forms of faith 

* Acts ii. 39. 



204 THE NEW MAN. 

have embodied important moral truths, but for want 
of this vitalizing influence they all wane to their 
extinction. Jesus Christ was announced as that 
being who should not baptize with water, — a cleans- 
ing merely of the outward life, — but who should 

" BAPTIZE WITH THE HOLY GHOST AND WITH FIRE." 

Within the circle of Christendom, as in a luminoas 
centre, is the risen and personal Christ, out of whose 
exalted nature comes, as out of the fulness of the 
Godhead, a life made diffusive through the hearts 
of men. This is the reason why within this circle 
come ever new undulations of energy, breaking into 
the belt of darkness that surrounds it. Hence every 
new season of refreshing has been a new coming of 
Christ, and every period of wide-spread renovation 
has been with a new consciousness of the personal 
presence of, and of personal relations to, the Divine 
Redeemer. The history of the Protestant Reforma- 
tion, and more especially of the Methodist renova- 
tion of the last century, will verify our statement. 
And it is quite as remarkable, that no sect or body 
of men that has received Christianity only as an 
abstract system of faith and morals, and its Founder 
only as an historical person, leaving out the living 
Christ as the ever-present medium of the Divine 
energy, has ever won for itself a place in history, as 
one of the great motive forces of human progress. 
Such sects have only a feeble and transitory exist- 
ence. They fall into dead works, collapse and die. 
They are the Ebionites of ecclesiastical annals. 
The bearing of this theme on individual regen- 



THE MEDIATOR. 205 

eration and progress is of transcendent importance. 
We make our appeal to the experience of the reader. 
When you have sought communion with God with- 
out a Mediator, have you not found your idea of 
God dissipated and fading off into Pantheism, till 
God becomes an evanescent spirit, that "rolls through 
all things," but from whose living Person comes no 
Divine energy that wakes up and concentrates all 
your faculties, and whose conscious presence is your 
comfort and joy ? And has not the religious senti- 
ment, from being the motive power to great sacrifices 
and achievements, sunk away towards an aimless 
and dreamy sentimentalism, or perhaps what is worse, 
a worldly insensibility and unbelief. Then Christ 
is an historical character, not the ever-present Medi- 
ator, in whom God is seen reconciling the world 
unto himself. Away back in the past he appears, 
as a beautiful pattern of excellence ; you reach after 
it, but you never get nearer to it ; and when you try 
to forsake your sins and escape from spiritual death, 
you seem to make no progress, like a man escaping 
from a monster in a dream. You find that the or- 
dinances of religion are soon without spirit and 
meaning. Why join a Church which has no living 
head except in a figure of speech ? Why keep cele- 
brating the death of one who has been dead two 
thousand years? Restore the doctrine of the One 
Divine Mediator to the Church and to your own 
soul, and see the change ! Not a Mediator who 
comes in between you and God to divert his pun- 
ishments, but out of whom comes God's all-renew- 

18 



206 THE NEW MAI?. 

ing spirit in unceasing waves of light and love, — 
the Mediator of the Church in the day of her bridal 
glories. Then you have the " Christ that died, — 
yea, rather, that is risen again," — the Saviour who 
appeared to St. John, and whose countenance is as 
the sun shining in his strength, who is present in 
his ordinances in a higher sense than the Papist 
dreams of, and who comes anew into your soul to 
make his truth alive and glowing. 

There are, we think, pretty clear indications that 
the present is a period that lies on the eve of one 
of those great renewals of the Church and of society 
which are called eras. Two things there are which 
raise the expectation that another wave out of the 
eternal energy is circling towards us, and even break- 
ing upon the shores of time. 

First, there is the indisputable fact that the old 
forms of belief and modes of operation have done 
about all they can do in renewing society. Misery 
and sin lie around the Church in solid masses, yea, 
within its inclosures ; and the conning of its litanies, 
and the recital of its creeds, have no more effect 
in penetrating these masses, than have moonbeams 
in melting the rock. What have the great world's 
affairs to do with the spells that are muttered in 
churches ? And yet the great world's affairs are 
going wrong. Doctrines clung to with the most 
tenacity have no intelligible reference to practice, 
and the practice is much the same .whether the doc- 
trines are assented to or not. Reformers go forth 
in their own name, but their fierce maledictions 



THE MEDIATOR. 207 

return back upon them, verifying anew the princi- 
ple, that he cannot cast out demons who is pos- 
sessed of one himself. At the same time, — and 
this is a second and most auspicious sign, — there 
is among men of earnest and reverent moods a 
pause and an expectation, as if they heard a di- 
vine voice just becoming articulate and audible, — 
coming, not out of the old creeds, but out of the 
Divine Word and out of the most interior conscious- 
ness of men, and prophesying of the things that are 
yet to be. They would say, and they do say, that 
our traditionary and tangled theologies do not give 
to them the living Christ, — the Christ that came 
to John in Patmos, or that broke upon Paul and 
arrested him with overwhelming glories. Though 
his death is celebrated on sacrament days, they yet 
feel that Christ is not dead ! On the other hand, a 
new Christology is being born out of the warm love 
of pious hearts, — as if the same Comforter were 
coming again and drawing all to himself. " What 
power divine diffuseth far this tenderness of mind ? " 
Whence this growing consciousness of the Saviour's 
personal presence as the luminous centre of his 
Church, and the living power in the heart of the dis- 
ciple, unless it be a new fulfilment of the promise, 
" I go away that I may come again." 

Meanwhile, let the disciple who seeks the renewal 
of himself learn his relations to the personal and 
living Saviour, — not merely the Christ of history, 
who " set an example " to men two thousand years 
ago, but the Mediator of the ever-present hour, out 



208 THE NEW MAN. 

of whose glorified humanity comes that Divine suf- 
fusion whose baptism is unto life eternal. And 
when he hears a gentle voice, that calls him in ac- 
cents more deeply moving than he is wont to hear, 
let him "turn and look," and he will behold one 
" like unto the Son of Man." 



CHAPTER IX. 

GETHSEMANE. 

" To put on clouds instead of light, 

And cloath the morning-starre with, dust, 
Was a translation of such height, 
As, but in thee, was ne'er exprest. 

" Ah, my dear Lord ! what couldst thou spye 
In this impure rebellious clay, 
That made thee thus resolve to dye 
For those that kill thee every day ? 

" 0, what strange wonders could thee move 
To slight thy precious bloud and breath ? 
Sure it was Love, my Lord ; for Love 
Is only stronger far than death." 

Vaughan. 

It will doubtless occur to the reader, that the 
foregoing argument is not complete. It will not 
be forgotten that the Saviour was tempted in all 
respects as we are, and if temptation can arise only 
from indwelling evil, how could it occur to him who 
was the impersonation of Unsullied Purity ? 

We recur to the distinction, already, we trust, 
made sufficiently broad and clear, between sin and 
innate proclivities to sin. For the first we are guilty, 
— for the last, never, till they have passed into vol- 
untary action. Those who ignore this distinction, 
and make " sin a nature," fixing moral guilt upon 

18* 



210 THE NEW MAN. 

innate proclivities, may well bring their speculations 
to a pause in view of the temptations of the desert 
and Gethsemane. In that presence we file our de- 
nial of a theology, which not only contradicts the 
moral sentiment of mankind, but in its last logical 
sequence would bring an imputation upon the Divine 
Sufferer himself. There can be no temptation, with- 
out inhering proclivities to wrong. If they are sin, 
what mean the temptations of the Son of Man ? 

They are not sin. But we go further than this. 
There may be a case, where to be tempted implies 
not only the absence of sin, but the highest good- 
ness and mercy ; for it may be a means of securing 
the weak and the fallen from moral ruin. 

Suppose a fire to occur at midnight, when some 
helpless family wakes up and finds itself surrounded 
with crackling timbers. Kind neighbors assemble. 
They beckon to the sufferers to come forth. They 
speak words of encouragement and sympathy. But 
what does all this avail ? for the distracted parents 
have retreated with their little ones to the last spot 
which is unconsumed, and while the fire begins to 
eat upon their flesh, they send forth in vain their 
cries for deliverance. At that moment the crowd, 
whose terrified faces reflect the glare that is flung 
over them, part asunder, and some being, in the calm 
strength of mercy, walks through the blaze, and, 
while the flames like the tongues of demons are 
darting around him, leads forth the family unharmed 
from their falling habitation. Which was the good 
man, he who stood aloof with kind words and wish- 



GETHSEMANE. 



211 



es, or he who came into the actual condition of the 
sufferers, that he might be their saviour and deliv- 
erer ? Doubtless the latter. 

An angel might have descended from heaven and 
proclaimed the gospel message from the tops of the 
mountains, and then returned and beckoned us after 
him to the skies. We should have gazed after him 
into heaven, and mused awhile upon the beautiful 
vision, which would have had no more effect in accom- 
plishing our deliverance, than a remembered dream. 
We are not angels, and how could we follow him in 
his flight ? This natural man we dwell in had be- 
come inflamed with every desire and passion that 
could destroy the soul. Then Jesus Christ assumed 
this very nature, with all its cumulative evil, — came 
down into our fleshly habitation and dwelt in it, that 
he might deliver us out of it unharmed. He took 
on him the seed of Abraham, that he might feel all 
the temptations which we do, and conquer them, — 
take up all our experience into his, and place upon 
himself all the burdens of our humanity. " He 
placed his shoulder beneath the rushing ruin, that 
he might lift it up into its eternal rest." 

And how does Christ deliver us by thus assuming 
our nature and being touched with the feeling of 
our infirmities ? In two ways. 

Here first comes in all the efficacy which we as- 
cribe to the example of the Saviour. It were no 
example to us, no revelation of human perfection, 
unless it exhibited to us human nature under temp- 
tation and suffering, which have so large a place in 



212 THE NEW MAN. 

our earthly probation. We want a pure and perfect 
ideal, shining aloft like a guiding star, that we 
may know in what direction we are to go. We 
might strive ever so much after perfection, but we 
should strive blindly, unless the lost ideal were re- 
stored to us. We want not only strength to walk 
firm, but light to show the way ; and hence we 
look to Christ that we may " follow him in the re- 
generation." By assuming our nature, he became 
conscious of all the propensities to wrong that assail 
us, and by resisting these in his own person till they 
were slain and banished, his nature was glorified 
till all its powers were the perfect media of the in- 
dwelling Divinity. This is a heaven-drawn picture 
of our regeneration. We resist the lower, or rather 
the outward nature, with its hereditary corruptions, 
till those corruptions cease to be, and then the out- 
ward man, instead of being opposed to the inward, 
becomes the clear medium through which its pure 
energies are manifested and poured abroad. 

The same conflict was in him that there is in us, — 
and when the conflict ceased he could say, " I and 
my Father are one "; " Now is the Son of Man glo- 
rified, and God is glorified in him " ; ■ — for then his 
humanity transmitted only the Holy Spirit, and 
was the unimpeded forth-going of the Godhead. 
So iii his follower when regenerated, — the whole 
outward man mirrors forth unclouded the graces of 
the inhabiting angel. 

Again, there is no reason to doubt that these scenes 
of temptation and suffering prepared him for the 
grand work of Mediation which we have already 



GETHSEMANE. 213 

k 

described. The influence which comes to us now 
out of his glorified nature, is adapted tenderly and 
effectively to our various needs, because he has 
risen out of this same condition, and can hold com- 
munion with us in every stage of our progress. He 
was not a man, but The Man. His is the all-com- 
prehensive humanity. What but sin can come into 
our experience, which his experience has not em- 
braced and taken up ? Infancy with all its infolded 
germs, and manhood with all its conscious procliv- 
ities, are here included. 

Out of a humanity, therefore, full-orbed and en- 
tire, the Comforter now comes to man. And all 
the Bethlehems, the deserts, the Gethsemanes, and 
the Calvarys of human life, are spanned by its 
warmth and effulgence. All conditions, from birth 
to death, have the Divine aid diversified and meted 
out to them. All experiences, from the lowest to the 
highest, have the Divine strength brought home to 
them in its tender and infinite adaptations. In that 
he hath " suffered, being tempted, he is able to suc- 
cor them that are tempted " ; and hence the omni- 
presence of a Saviour's love, that finds us from the 
first inspiration of our infant breath to its last ex- 
piration in the gasp of dissolution. If God were 
to approach us in his unveiled and awful essence, 
we should perish in the blinding and consuming 
splendors. But coming to us out of the Glorified 
Sufferer, we receive of his fulness, grace for his 
grace, virtue answering to his virtue, till the sweet 
image of the Crucified has copied itself into our 
lowly and obedient souls. 



CHAPTER X 

THE ATONEMENT. 



" An I lyke as lie made the Jewes and Gentiles at one betwene themselves, euen so 
he made them both at one with God, that there should be nothing to breake the 
Atonement^ but that the thinges in heauen and the thynges in earth shoulde be 
ioyned together as it were into one body." — Udal. Eph. c. 2. 



We have partly anticipated this topic in the last 
two chapters. But the word Atonement, though not 
the one under which the Scriptures usually describe 
the work of human redemption, has become so 
prominent in Christian literature, and invested with 
such peculiar interest, that we do not feel that our 
statement is exhaustive until the argument has em- 
braced this topic as it lies in our church theologies. 
We shall note here the various aspects of opinion 
which this phraseology is supposed to indicate. 
We do this, not for the sake of controversy, but for 
the sake of perspicuity. We shall thus accept and 
appropriate all the truth which this phraseology 
may symbolize, and we shall make our own doctrine 
clearly denned and understood. Very likely we may 
not state these forms of belief with the sharp pre- 
cision with which they are drawn out in systems of 
dogmatic theology, which we have not time nor wish 



THE ATONEMENT. 215 

now to turn over. We shall state them, however, 
as we have met them, and as we suppose they lie 
practically in believing minds. 

The atonement is reconciliation of man to God. 
Two things are implied by this word ; first, the final 
results which the atonement would effectuate, and, 
secondly, the modes and procedures by which these 
results are sought. One refers to the end, the other 
to the means employed. 

On the first point we do not know that there is 
any diversity of opinion, at least any that is worth 
our analysis. The design of God in the great plan 
of redemption is to make man holy. Its last results, 
then, are in the human soul. They are entirely sub- 
jective. When human nature is raised up and 
purified, and brought into harmonic relations with 
the Divine nature, the final results of the Divine 
plan are accomplished. It is very true, that there is 
a great deal of phraseology among theological writ- 
ers which would fairly imply that the atonement 
wrought a change in God as well as man, in that it 
made him placable and " cooled his wrath " ; but we 
presume that these are ideas which all intelligent 
believers would now disavow. God is unchangea- 
ble love and justice, and the only change sought is 
subjectively in man, so as to bring him within the 
scope of that love and justice. 

But when we come to ask what are the modes 
and procedures by which God seeks to effect this 
change in man, we find a diversity of speculations 
and theories. They may be reduced, however, to 



216 THE NEW MAN. 

four, and be characterized with sufficient precision 
as the theory of substitution, of exhibition, of satis- 
faction, and of mediation. 

1. That of substitution supposes that Christ suf- 
fered strictly and literally in the stead of man. The 
law of God denounces eternal misery against sin, 
even to the smallest transgression. But all men 
have sinned, and the execution of the law upon them 
would consign the whole race to hopeless ruin. 
Then Christ comes as a substitute, and bears in his 
own person an amount of suffering equivalent to 
the eternal punishment of all mankind. 

But all mankind are not therefore saved. Each 
has something to do individually in order to appro- 
priate to himself the benefits of this provision. He 
receives them by an act of faith in this vicarious 
atonement, whereby all his sins are cancelled. 

We reject all this as the plan of system-builders, 
but not of God. We reject it primarily on Scripture 
ground, since the original terms from which our 
word atonement comes do not include the notion of 
vicarious substitution.* That our sins were made 
over to Christ and his merits made over to us, so 
that the account may stand balanced in the book of 



* The Hebrew verb *t23 (Kapher), to atone, and its Greek correlates 
IXdaKOfiai, i^i\dofxai, and KaraWdcro-a), mean properly to produce agree- 
ment. The lexicographers include " to appease " within the import of 
the first two, but the element of vicarious substitution is totally want- 
ing. See Gen. xxxii. 20 ; Ex. xxx. 12 ; Ezek. xvi. 63 ; xlv. 15 ; Dan. 
ix. 24; Is. xxii. 14; Eom. v. 11 ; 2 Cor. v. 18-20; Eph. ii. 16; Col 
i. 20; Heb. ii. 17; Matt. v. 24. 



THE ATONEMENT. 217 

doom, are notions which we hold to be remnants of 
scholastic web-weaving, having no basis in Scripture 
or in the nature of things. How Christ " takes our 
infirmities and bears our sicknesses" will be quite 
obvious by reference to the language of the Evan- 
gelist in Matthew viii. 17. "What he did for man 
physically illustrates what he was doing for man 
spiritually. He did not cure the leper by becoming 
one himself, thus drawing off the disease into his 
own person ; he cured him by cleansing the leprosy 
away. 

But, again, there is no economy in this plan. The 
design of infinite mercy is the prevention of suf- 
fering in the universe. But under this scheme no 
suffering has been saved. Just as great an amount 
has transpired as if Christ had never come, and the 
whole race been doomed to eternal woe. All that 
woe was concentred on him, who was " surrounded, 
and, as it were, besieged with an army of sorrows." 
The storm has had its way, and spent all its rage, 
and effected all its ruin, only the scene of ruin was 
transferred to another field. But there it is, and there 
it lies, an equal space of blackness and desolation 
in the fair universe of God. The punishment has 
fallen in all its weight, and produced all its pangs, 
only it has taken a different direction. All the differ- 
ence is this, — that the guilty who deserved it would 
otherwise have borne it, whereas the innocent that 
did not deserve it bears it now ! No matter, in the 
light of this argument, whether the innocent were 
a willing victim or not. Such a scheme of mercy 

19 



218 THE NEW MAN. 

has prevented no suffering, nor saved the universe a 
single pang. 

" But this plan is the only one that can produce 
holiness." In other phrase, they alone whose faith 
takes this special and technical form are holy. The 
assumption means that, if it means any thing, and 
it is quite as inconsistent with the known facts of 
history as with a comprehending charity. Charity is 
the prime essential of salvation, and it is not apt to 
coexist very long with that exclusive spirit which 
comes from making belief in dogmas the separating 
line of human character. 

So, again, we reject this theory, because of the 
adjuncts which it draws along with it, and which no 
logic that we are masters of can clear away. It 
makes salvation depend on the accidents of birth, 
locality, and position. All who lived before Christ 
are lost, for no such atonement was preached to them. 
The Jews even, who believed prospectively in Christ, 
believed in him not as a suffering Messiah, and 
elaborated no such theory as this from their own 
Scripture. All who live outside of Christendom are 
lost, for they never heard of this atonement, and 
could not be saved by believing it. Alas for the 
sages and good men who lived by the light of nature 
as well as they might, and the record of whose vir- 
tues so often flings shame upon our Christian prac- 
tice! For four thousand years the world was a 
mistake, and man a failure, and with few exceptions 
he is a failure yet. All who die before the age of 
rationality are lost, for without rationality they can- 



THE ATONEMENT. * 219 

not grasp such a faith ; and so infancy and childhood 
go down in a hopeless procession into that folding 
night which the fingers of morning are never to un- 
bar. Most who die within Christendom are lost, 
including the vast numbers of humble and pious 
men and women who never theologize, but simply 
trust in Christ and there leave the matter, and 
thence build their hope in heaven, — but in vain* 
We dread the influence of these ideas on our wor- 
ship, for they darken our thought of God ; on our 
charity, for they hedge it in and destroy all large, 
genial, and goodly fellowship ; on our preparation 
for a better state, for they make faith, and not life, 
primary and fundamental.* 

2. The second theory supposes it necessary that 
God should make such an exhibition to the universe 
of his displeasure against sin, that men would be 
impressed with the idea of its deadly nature. Such 
an exhibition was the scene on Calvary. Forgive- 
ness on simple repentance were not otherwise safe. 



* We do not mean to say, that all these dismal consequences are ac- 
knowledged and embraced by all who hold the doctrine of a vicarious 
atonement. But admitting that the end of the atonement is to pro- 
duce a change not in God, but in man, we say these consequences are 
the necessary corollaries of the theory of substitution. For the mat- 
ter stands thus : — 

A vicarious atonement by the death of Christ was not necessary to 
prevent suffering, for the whole equivalent suffering has transpired. 

It was not necessary to salvation, if human beings are saved without 
believing it. 

If they are not saved without believing it, then all the adjuncts be- 
long to it which the text details. 



220 THE NEW MAN 

They would sin again and again, if they thought for- 
giveness were so cheaply obtained. Not so when 
they look at the great agony on Calvary, where they 
see at once the cost of forgiveness and the frown of 
God upon transgression. 

We lay off from all this so much as would impute 
to God the work of scene-showing for the sake of 
sensible impression, if such a conception be included, 
and then we come to the essential truth which this 
theory contains. The cross is, in a most important 
sense, the expression of God's hatred of sin. There 
is the point where the awful antagony between 
the eternal purity and human corruption was even 
brought down into the sphere of sense and made 
apprehensible there. Would the Son of God be- 
come incarnate and surround himself with the lowly 
conditions of mortal existence, would such a being 
suffer and die, would all this wealth of means be 
expended to banish sin from the domains of God, 
unless he regarded it as the supreme curse, the in- 
finite woe? The sinner may, indeed, measure the 
depth of his guilt by the height of that great agony. 
But let him not look to Calvary as the place of 
scenic display. Rather were the agony and the 
darkened sun the ultimation on the plane of nature 
of the state of fallen humanity. The Jewish Church 
was darkened, she on whom the Everlasting Light 
arose. Her sun was blotted out, and her stars had 
fallen from the sky. Her children had commit- 
ted that sin which is called unpardonable. They 
had been guilty of the awful crime of Deicide, for 



THE ATONEMENT. 221 

they had killed the Divine Life in the soul, and in 
the Church God's mystical body. Let this spirit- 
ual state be outshadowed in the visible world and 
on the plane of nature, and there culminate in its 
last results, and what else would they be, what 
else could they be, but the sun gone out in the 
heavens, and that form which was the incarnation 
of the Divine Life hung bleeding upon the cross, 
or laid in the sepulchre stiff and cold? It is a 
mistake to imagine that here is an exhibition of 
the nature of Jewish sin in particular, and not of 
all sin, ever and everywhere. All sin is a conflict 
with the Divine nature, only here the scene of 
that conflict was outshadowed from the field of 
spirit into the field of sense. The Divine Life is 
first resisted and crucified within, and after that we 
are in opposition to all its embodiments without, 
and if in our power we should resist and crucify it 
there. The cause of eternal truth and right, God's 
ever-returning and reappearing Messiah, has always 
waked up the same conflict as it comes athwart 
the lusts of selfish men, and every country has its 
bloody Calvary and its holy sepulchre where that 
truth was murdered and entombed. On all the high 
places of the earth has the Christ been slain. In 
Judea he appeared in human form and with more 
intimate relations with nature, and so there nature 
was afflicted and shaken when the sacrifice was 
made. It would be so again could there be such a 
thing as a reincarnation of the Word. It is the 
essential opposition between an unregenerate human 

19* 



222 THE NEW MAN. 

nature, with its cruel lusts and passions, and the 
Divine nature so pure and awfully serene. The 
denial, the conflict, and the Deicidium commence in 
the secret soul. Their forth-going and culmination 
are seen in the awful spectacle on Calvary. 

"We must not imagine, however, that impressions 
from without upon the senses are chiefly efficacious 
in making forgiveness safe or sin hateful. When 
God comes within us and reveals us, and shows our 
inhering corruption in contrast with the eternal 
purity and holiness, we have an exhibition of the 
hatefulness of sin, such as no spectacle in the natu- 
ral world can give. It is the everlasting light let 
down through the abysses of our being, detecting sin 
in all its hiding-places, and unveiling its intrinsic 
qualities to the afflicted consciousness. Whoever 
has attained to regeneration, forgiveness, and peace, 
through these self- explorations (and forgiveness 
comes in no other way), no more desires to relapse into 
his former state, than the prisoner who has emerged 
out of the miasma of a noisome dungeon into the 
blessed light and air, desires to be remanded to his 
prison again. " They would sin again and again, if 
they thought repentance were so easily obtained." 
As if the new man could regard sin as the supreme 
good, be drawn to it by all his interior sympathies, 
and only serve God under duress and be bound to 
that service by galling chains ! 

3. The third theory supposes that in some way 
the Divine law was satisfied by Jesus Christ, so as 
to render it possible for God to pardon sin ; and this 



THE ATONEMENT. 



223 



we have called the theory of satisfaction. It does 
not assert that the sufferings of Christ were strictly 
vicarious ; but it does assert, that Christ in some 
way satisfied the demands of the law, preserved its 
honor and integrity, so that now men can be saved 
on condition of repentance ; whereas if Christ had 
not died, repentance would have been unavailing. 

All this we hold. But we must explain more 
fully what we understand by the Divine law, in 
order to evolve whatever of truth this formula of 
doctrine may contain. 

By law we may mean either of two things. We 
may mean those principles of eternal order accord- 
ing to which the Divine Mind always operates, and 
the Divine energies always flow. These principles 
pervade all modes of being, spirit and matter, the 
spirit world and the natural. They constitute that 
law which Hooker defines so well, " whose seat is 
the bosom of God, and whose voice is the harmony of 
the world." By this the worlds are formed, for they 
are the emanations of the Eternal Energy shaped by 
the Eternal Reason, " without which nothing was 
made that was made." They are the Divine Word 
in action, constituting that inmost life of things 
which determines all form and motion, and is ever 
in effort to shape and guide them so as to express 
and copy out the Divine idea of the supreme ex- 
cellency and beauty. " The speech of God which 
produces the works of creation is the immutable 
reason, not a sound spoken and vanishing, but a 
force eternall]- subsisting and flowing through na- 



224 THE NEW MAN. 

ture." * The method by which this force always 
flows is the Divine law, for it is the method of Di- 
vine action. It is the supreme order, which God 
cannot break, and which if man breaks, he surely 
suffers. In accordance with this same truth, the 
Greek called the creation the Cosmos, or Beautiful 
Order. 

Or, again, we may mean by the Divine law these 
inhering and pervading principles described and 
embodied in a written code. But this is all the 
same, except that now the law that ever works in 
the heart and substance of things is put into the 
formulas of language. Divine revelation is a dis- 
closure to man of those immutable principles ac- 
cording to which the spirit-world is arranged; for 
man had lost the intuitive knowledge of these in 
his degeneracy and fall. In other phrase, the Di- 
vine Word, by which all things are made, whose 
eternal forth -goings constitute the inmost life of 
angel, spirit, or man, and whose lowest revealments 
and blossomings constitute the natural world with 
all its outspread scenery, is clothed in the symbols 
of speech, and that gives us the Bible or written 
word ; but clothed in nature, or clothed in language, 
its established sequences or its order of operation 
is the perfect and everlasting law. 

All this is very clear. But we illustrate further* 

* " Dei quippe sublimor ante suum factum locutio ipsius sui facti est 
immutabilis ratio, quae non habet sonum strepentem atque transeuntem, 
sed vim sempiterne manentem et temporaliter operantem." — Augustine, 
De Otv. Dei. 



THE ATONEMENT. 225 

It is a law of nature that matter gravitates towards 
matter, a law pervading primarily every atom and 
thence every world, making planets and suns travel 
the fields of space according to a divine arrangement, 
and thus unrolling in its order the scenery of the 
skies. It was well for man to know this law ; but 
his knowing it did not make it, and does not alter it. 
It was all the same before put into the formulas of 
Newton's Principia. Again, it is a law of the spirit- 
world that love unifies and draws together, and hate 
repels and puts asunder; that one places the soul in 
harmony with the Divine nature, and so draws it to 
God, and that the other places it in opposition, so that 
the Divine nature repels it. This law, operating first 
in individual minds and thence in the social and spir- 
itual worlds, arranges the vast scheme of existence 
through all its descending grades and orders, from 
the blessed spirits who " all day long bask round 
the throne of God," to those who seek the abysses 
of night, away from the Divine countenance be- 
cause they " hate its beams." This law creates and 
arranges heaven and hell. This ever was and ever 
must be. And when revelation placed before us the 
words, Come, ye blessed ! and Depart, ye cursed ! it 
put into its formula a law of eternal order. 

When written laws are not the exposition of in- 
working and unchanging principles, we call them 
arbitrary. They are something superimposed. They 
are forced upon us by a foreign will, a will painfully 
dissonant from that whose voice is the harmony of 
the worlds. They are not transcripts of the un- 



226 THE NEW MAN. 

changeable Justice. Hence, though man's laws may- 
be arbitrary, God's never can be. He never can put 
into a written code, for man's observance, aught 
else than the principles of the Beautiful Order. The 
previous law was perfect, for it was God's inworking 
and perfect will. God is wise, and cannot err in the 
transcript. He will transcribe none other, for he 
will not act in opposition to himself or in discord- 
ance with his own will. 

Now we fully believe and hold that the race could 
not be redeemed, and the supreme order remain un- 
broken, without the incarnation, death, and resurrec- 
tion of the Son of Man. These are all the fulfil- 
ment of the everlasting law, — not of an arbitrary 
rule of Divine action, but of principles that inhere 
in the constitution of the universe. Could we see 
things from that point whence the omniscient eye 
surveys them, looking from centre to circumference, 
we should see, doubtless, why God could not other- 
wise impart himself to humanity so as to regenerate 
and save it. We should see that there was no other 
mode of the Divine advent, without some infraction 
of that law whose voice is the universal harmony. 
Even with our low and finite views, we can see 
some of the reasons why this is so. For suppose 
God had been revealed to darkened and fallen man, 
not through a humanity that came down into man's 
condition, but out of the naked heavens and in his 
unclothed and burning essence, how might man's 
free agency have been destroyed, while God became 
to him a blasting light or a consuming fire ! Or 



THE ATONEMENT. 227 

suppose God had imparted himself by an influ- 
ent life, which human nature weak and palsied 
by sin could not bear ; how might man have moved 
under a power that overlaid his volitions and pos- 
sessed his faculties, and so have been merged in 
passive nature, and ceased to be man ! Hence we 
say and believe, that not only the death of Christ, 
but the incarnation, with all its concomitants, the 
radiating fact in human history, to which all fore- 
time and after-time have reference, is a fulfilment 
of the eternal law, the perfection and preservation 
of the Beautiful Order.* 

4. The pernicious consequence of framing a the- 
ory of the atonement which shall be dominant and 
exclusive, must, we think, be obvious. In any single 
view of this central fact, we get only one of its be- 
nignant aspects, — and it is proof enough that this 
is a Divine work, that no one theory which men 
have framed about it is exhaustive or comprehends 
it. It will be seen at once, that the views presented 
under the last head pertain more to the reasons and 
motives of Divine action, than to the positive duties 

* We have heard it said, " How are our past sins to be cancelled, 
•without a vicarious atonement ? Even could we become perfectly 
holy, there is the unsatisfied law claiming vengeance for the guilty 
past." As if God's law were arbitrary, a mere parchment regulation, 
that requires vengeance to be rained upon us from without, after we 
have been brought into inward harmony with the Divine will ! Since 
the law is none other than the Divine nature acting within us, it is 
satisfied when it has brought our natures into entire concord with it- 
self, and never till then. After that, punishment for the past would 
be revenge. 



228 THE NEW MAN. 

of man. The sinner may receive all the benefits of 
the atonement, without knowing all the reasons and 
motives of it. We come, then, to another theory, 
that of mediation, not as distinct from the last two, 
but including them and a great deal more. It does 
not attempt to scan this great work from the Divine 
point of view, but to present it to man in its prac- 
tical bearing, and thus to turn its full power upon 
the human soul. 

"We have already attempted to describe the atone- 
ment in this bearing and aspect, in the last two 
chapters. It offers to us Jesus Christ as the medium 
of Divine truth, and of that sovereign energy under 
which man is created anew and restored to God's 
resplendent image. It seeks less to explore the pro- 
cesses by which this is done, or the reasons which 
necessitate this mode of Divine operation. Enough 
that God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
himself, and that those who yield themselves to him 
have their natures restored to heavenly order and 
peace, and are drawn to God in relations that are 
sweet and tender. It is this which meets the wants 
of man as a sinner. It is this which has saved 
thousands who never elaborated a philosophy of 
salvation. Profoundly acknowledging the Messi- 
ahship of Christ and his indwelling Divinity, and 
brought in meek surrender at his feet, they find 
themselves ensphered by the power of the Godhead, 
whereby they change from sin to holiness ; and 
health runs through their whole spiritual frames; 
the palsied powers are touched and lifted up ; the 



THE ATONEMENT. 229 

Adam of consciousness is expelled, and the Christ 
of consciousness is formed out of the old chaos ; a 
new creation beneath the eye of God, " how good, 
how fair, answering his great idea." This, in a 
most important sense, is being clothed in the right- 
eousness of Christ, not by a factitious transfer of 
his righteousness to our account, but by his life 
imported into our natures, and thence going out 
into conduct. It is a righteousness not imputed, 
but imparted. This is the essential work of the 
atonement, and in this wise it lies in the inmost con- 
sciousness of all true and humble believers. They 
know that God in Christ is brought near to them, 
and folds them in his renewing light and love. That 
God in imparting himself through such a Mediator 
fulfils his own eternal law, they doubt not ; then- 
part is to be brought into such relation to Christ, 
that his imparted life shall be the prompting of all 
their affections and powers. This is the atonement, 
we say, as it lies at the centre of the Christian con- 
sciousness, and as such it appears conspicuously in 
the first conversions to Christianity. It was God in 
Christ, coming anew into the heart of humanity 
and making conquest of all its powers, striking 
down the persecutor with shafts of light, and sway- 
ing vast multitudes, because on them " the Holy 
Ghost fell." This relation to a Divine Mediator is 
cognizable in the intuitions of all pious men ; it 
has inspired every thing in Christian literature that 
speaks to our inmost needs, and all that truly lives 
in its sacred songs. Sinful man, by a lowly surren- 
20 



230 THE NEW MAN. 

der of himself to Christ, brought into dear and har- 
monic relations with the Divine nature, — this is 
the fact of the atonement, whatever be its philosophy. 
The fact cannot be reasoned out of the true believer, 
for it belongs to his intuitive consciousness. To 
account for it, to draw it out in schemes of theol- 
ogy, and give the reasons of the Divine plan, is a 
process of logic alone. This last process may lead 
into mazes and errors, for logic does not create 
truth, nor see it in its source, but seeks rather to ham- 
mer its broken ore into shapes for convenient hand- 
ling. With our intuitive consciousness it is other- 
wise ; for with it we are brought face to face with 
truth in its living source, and gaze with open eye on 
its supreme excellences and glories. 

It will hence appear what is the peculiar efficacy 
of faith in the salvation of man, which the New 
Testament writers make so much account of, and 
on which Paul, especially, insists so largely. It is 
not merely a belief in any amount of dogmas and 
postulates, however true. It is not merely a belief in 
Christ as an authorized teacher of religion and mor- 
als. It is such belief as shall lead to an all-confiding 
trust. Trust is the more appropriate word ; for the 
faith in Christ that saves, is not so much the result 
of intellection as a perception of his moral grand- 
eur and Divinity, adequate to our necessities, and 
adapted to fill the chasm in our natures. Then we 
fly to him with the swift alacrity of a child that 
seeks a lost parent, and our natures are tender and 
pliable beneath his hand. Faith in Christ is not a 



THE ATONEMENT. 



231 



mere belief in the historical advent, but in the living 
Christ that ever comes from the heavens as the 
Comforter and Redeemer of souls. Such was the 
faith for which Paul reasoned so earnestly ; not a 
faith which should entitle the believer to a share 
in some reserved fund of foreign merit, but bring 
him into living relations to a Divine Mediator, so 
that his heart should be swept all the while with 
renewing gales, and have a righteousness imparted 
to him every hour. Precisely here is the point 
where he contrasts the dead works of the ceremonial 
law with the works of faith under Christianity. 
They were the righteousness of the outward man. 
These were the outgoings, the outburstings, shall we 
not say, of the life whose unfailing tides came in 
upon them in consequence of their relation to a liv- 
ing Intercessor in the heavens. Paul himself had 
had a signal experience of this influence, melting 
the adamant of Jewish bigotry, and making the 
Pharisee as humble as a child, while the source of 
this influence was unveiled to him in its insufferable 
splendors. Hence his great topic is faith in Christ, 
as the essential of inward life and power ; the es- 
sential of that regenerating influence which should 
draw man to God, and so restore human nature and 
the Divine nature to their primal harmonies. " One 
Mediator, Christ," says old Tyndal, " and by that 
word vnderstand an attonemaker, a peace-maker, and 
brynger into grace and fauour, hauyng full power to 
do so." 



CHAPTER XI. 

NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH. 



" What this repentance was which the new covenant required as one of the con- 
ditions to be performed by all those who should receive the benefits of that cove- 
nant, is plain in the Scripture to be not only sorrow for sins past, but (what is a 
natural consequence of such sorrow if it be real) a turning from them into a new 
and contrary life." — Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity. 



\ 



" "Work ! and thou shalt bless the day 
Ere thy task be done ; 
They that work not, cannot pray, 
Cannot feel the sun. 

" "Worlds thou mayst possess with health 
And unslumbering powers ; 
Industry alone is wealth, — 
"What we do is ours." 



There is a state of mind which we call repent- 
ance, — the antecedent of regeneration and perma- 
nent peace, whose nature it behooves us well to un- 
derstand. Whenever the book of life within us is 
unfolded, and the Divine light falls upon its open 
pages, we see and feel the afflicting contrast between 
that life and the all-perfect law. The immanence 
of God in unregenerate man brings to view at 
length the all-holy and pure in contrast with human 
corruption. Then sin and the corrupt fountains of 



NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH. 233 

sin appear to us more hideous than death, not 
merely for the inconveniences that will follow after 
them, but on account of their own intrinsic nature. 
Nothing, then, appears to us so dreadful to be borne, 
as the present burden of moral disease ; and we shall 
pray for its removal more earnestly than we would 
pray for the extraction of a cancer from our vitals. 
The affliction which we experience from the unveil- 
ing of inherent corruption, is what the Scriptures 
describe under the phrase " godly sorrow." It is not 
regret on account of the consequences of sin, but an 
afflicting consciousness of its nature. The change 
of life prompted by this state of mind the Scriptures 

Call REPENTANCE.* 

Hence an all-important distinction. Neither sor- 
row nor emotion of any kind is true repentance. 
Godly sorrow precedes and prompts it, but there 
may be godly sorrow even without it. Our trans- 
lators have unfortunately rendered by the same word 
two others, which stand for very different ideas. 
One word implies simply sorrow for the past ; the 
other implies sorrow for the past consummated in 
a new life. One is mental emotion. The other is 
mental emotion invested with new moralities. One 
(/jL€TdfjLe\o<;) is sorrow of mind, and is used to de- 
scribe the emotions of Judas before he hanged him- 
self.f The other (fierdvoia) is change of purpose 
and conduct, and describes that repentance over 
which the angels rejoice as they bend around the 

* 2 Cor. yii. 9, 10. t Matt, xxvii. 3. 

20* 



234 THE NEW MAN. 

returning prodigal to breathe over him his welcome 
home.* 

Two worlds are ours, one creative of the other. 
There is the inner realm of thought, emotion, and 
imagination, and there is the outward realm of 
practice, where thought, emotion, and imagination 
take their investiture of flesh and matter, and pass 
into nature and history. In one we have them in 
their warmth and fusion, in the other we have them 
crystallized into fact. All radical changes in char- 
acter begin with changes in the inner realm of 
thought and emotion. There we are moved upon 
by the powers that are above us; by the Eternal 
Spirit that lies on our souls like a haunting pres- 
ence, giving us visions of celestial purity, bitter com- 
punctions, sighs for a better state, and images that 
float down out of heaven through our fancies. But 
none of these are yet ours. They sometimes come 
without any agency whatever of our own. Thus 
far they have wrought no change in character, for 
they have not yet passed under the action of a hu- 
man will. Left to themselves they are indetermi- 
nate as celestial ethers. They are appropriated by 
a distinct agency on our part, which consists in giv- 
ing them a place by our own right arm among fixed 
and solid realities. The thoughts and emotions 
wrought in us by the Spirit of God are as yet for- 
eign to us. They are heavenly treasures let down 
within our grasp. We grasp them by fixing them 

* Luke xv. 10. 



NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH. 235 

in the voluntary life, and then they are for ever 
ours. 

The words heaven and earth are employed by the 
sacred writers to describe this twofold realm of in- 
ward faith and feeling, and outward life and practice. 
For heaven is the higher state of being, and earth 
is the world of grosser substances. Things seen are 
the copies and manifestations of things invisible. 
So heaven and earth, in the figurative language of 
Scripture, mean, first, that supernal state into which 
man's mind may be elevated, and whence it may 
be impressed and moved, and, again, that external 
sphere of action into which this state passes by his 
free volitions and energies ; one a counterpart of the 
other ; the last imprinted by the first and receiving 
and fixing its ideals* 

Or, to insist on a still more literal and scientific 
exposition of the terms, earth is none other than the 
atmospheres of heaven arrested and condensed in- 
to solid forms. The ethers that expand above us 
through infinite depths of blue, through which float 
the amber clouds or stream the glories of a firma- 
ment of suns, are simply what remains of those at- 
mospheres that determined into shape and became 
the earths of a beneficent and ever-working system. 

* For instances where the word heaven is used representatively for 
the highest or inmost principles and truths, and earth for those principles 
and truths embodied in grosser forms, in the external life, in institutions 
religious and civil, see Is. xiii. 13 ; xxxiv. 4 ; lxv. 17 ; lxvi. 22 ; Luke 
iii. 21 ; xxi. 26; John i. 51 ; iii. 13; Acts ii. 19, 20; Col. i. 20; Rev. 
xxi. 1. 



236 



THE NEW MAN. 



Even thus the new heaven of truth that opens upon 
us, and the celestial ethers that play upon our souls, 
are arrested and made permanent by being turned 
into new moralities. Out of the new heavens that 
God provides, the new earth is formedy* — and then 
man is a new creation, a microcosm in which all 
spiritual and earthly things are abridged and pic- 
tured forth. 

From this exposition of the nature of repentance, 
a lesson comes to us which is most important and 
solemn. There is a constant tendency in the un- 
regenerate heart, to seek some substitute for the 
new creation, in obtaining Divine favor and pardon. 
Sometimes it is a mystic faith, sometimes it is 
mystic emotion, but all ending short of new morali- 
ties. Hence the pernicious habit of delay in religion, 
under the delusive idea that the regenerate man is 
a sudden and miraculous creation out of nothing, 
never considering, that not only a new heaven is to 
be created, but also " a new earth in which dwelleth 
righteousness." There is a class of mental exercises 
known as " death-bed repentances," the nature and 
efficacy of which may now be pretty clearly dis- 
tinguished. "We know, for we have seen, the spirit- 
ualizing influence of sickness upon the heart and 
character. We have stood by the bed of death, 
when the spirit seemed unclothed gradually and 
gently, as by an angel's softest touch, and finally 
passed away like a wave scarcely breaking upon the 
immortal shores. But what we now refer to is 
the sudden and radical change that is supposed 



NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH. 237 

to take place in impenitent men who have postponed 
the claims of God and the angel-call, when thought 
and feeling are deemed a sufficient equivalent for a 
new life. It is evident enough that even godly sorrow 
could not now become repentance. Character can no 
more be built on thought and feeling, than a house 
can be built on air. Prayer may be fervent, but pray- 
er at that hour can only be spoken, not acted. Peni- 
tence may be deep, but it cannot be turned into fact 
Truth may be contemplated, but it cannot crystal] ize 
into conduct. Good purposes may be formed, but 
they cannot go into execution. Once the feet might 
have moved swift on the errands of love, once the 
hand was strong to do its work. But the feet will 
not now bear up their load, and " the graceful right 
hand has lost its cunning." God may bend over him 
the new heavens, from which shine the eternal stars, 
and may breathe around him celestial ethers that 
play into his heart, but the new earth cannot now 
be formed out of them, and without both no man is 
a new creation. So that the dying man wakes up 
unchanged among spiritual realities, his baseless im- 
aginations all vanishing like the fast-fading hues of 
sunset clouds, when the blackness of night is all 
that remains. No truth is ours till the arm has 
given it a local habitation, and no emotion passes 
into a permanent frame until it determines into 
principle. No theology is saving that is not worked, 
no man is in the way to heaven who is not in the 
way of a good and a useful life. From a disregard 
of these truths, how many have sought heaven in 



238 THE NEW MAN. 

vain through "imputed righteousness," and how- 
many churches have become dead, and left high and 
dry on the barren downs, while the stream of history 
is sweeping by ! Faith becomes separated from life, 
having no connection with week-day affairs, and the 
Church stands in the midst of society, having no 
more living relations with its business than the 
bones that slumber beneath its chancel-floors. 



CHAPTER XII. 

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 

" Survey the bright dominions 
In the gorgeous colors drest 
Flung from off the purple pinions 

Evening spreads throughout the west ! " 

"Wordsworth. 

We ask the reader's attention a little further, while 
we retrace the path we have gone over, and note the 
distinct stages of Christian progress. Not that these 
can always be so defined in individual experience, 
that the point of transition from one to another will 
be fully marked and distinguished. Nevertheless 
they are there ; and, described in succession, they will 
be recognized as separate portions of that way over 
which the pilgrim travels from the " city of Destruc- 
tion " to the « city of God." 

1. First is the decisive act of self-consecration to 
the Divine Spirit, that speaks in us and claims us 
from our infant years. The idea of the heavenly 
life, once received, will glow in the young mind like 
a live coal r every thing tending to fortify the holy 
purpose and make it the governing and unitizing 
principle of all endeavor. Happy are they who have 
early embraced this idea, and who, in the first joy- 



240 THE NEW MAN. 

cms exercise of the dawning reason, have not been 
disobedient to the heavenly vision. They preserve 
their youthful virtue " englobed " within them, never 
yielding to depraved hereditary impulsions, not lis- 
tening to the voice of false charmers, but to the 
" Come up hither" of the angel powers. The first 
exercise of the high prerogatives of free moral 
agency is thus the first stage in a life of holiness. 
It is the first decisive choice between hereditary or 
surrounding evil that sways us towards the world 
of shadows, and the God that ever knocketh at the 
door of our hearts and caJleth us to the world of 
light. 

2. Those who have chosen the good and the true, 
and the life in conformity with them, sometimes 
fondly imagine that naught lies before them now 
but a path of roses. They think the Christian life 
is only an easy progress from one pleasant prospect 
to another. But they find they are mistaken. They 
did not know all that was in them at the beginning. 
But the God to whom they have consecrated them- 
selves, the Light which they have chosen to follow, 
is sure to reveal them. He comes within them when 
invoked and welcomed, first to pour a startling radi- 
ance through their disordered nature, and make all 
its hidden corruption stand confessed. To this end 
is the discipline of life, to this end the allurements 
of temptation, to this end all trials and sufferings, — 
God's heralds of mercy in rough disguise, — to this 
end at first his holy word, that holds to human na- 
ture an unerring glass. Thus our most secret foes 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 241 

come out of their ambush and file before us in dark 
array till our self-revelation is complete. 

3. Then comes the battle of life. Then we un- 
derstand what the old saints mean, who call the 
Christian life a life of struggle and warfare. We 
seem, it may be, to have backslidden from our po- 
sition, when we embraced in our first enthusiasm 
the idea of the Christian life ; and the blessed pros- 
pect that rose on our earlier vision is snatched from 
view. At the season of our baptismal vows, the 
heavens were opening and the Holy Dove descend- 
ing. That has passed away like a dream of para- 
dise, and we find ourselves on the desert of tempta- 
tion in conflict with its beasts of prey. Our deep- 
est want is now felt ; all human aid is utterly in- 
sufficient ; mere examples and models of perfection 
mock and afflict us, for we cannot reach them ; the 
teachings of conflicting sects grate on our ears like 
Babel-noises; we see, away and above us the land 
of peace, but, hedged about with foes, we cannot 
travel its upward path, while 

" Rooted here we stand, and gaze 
On those bright steps that heavenward raise 
Their practicable way." 

Such is the region where lies the conflict of life ? 
when our weakness is felt most despairingly, and 
we fling away as worthless our broken shield. 

4. Then the want within us points to Him who 
alone can save. The Mediator, from whom comes 
to us the all-revealing and renewing Divinity, rises 
on our sight, as he rose on his early Church, like the 

21 



242 THE NEW MAN. 

sun shining in his strength. If before he was on- 
ly a teacher and an example, he is now a quickening 
and regenerating power. If before we were com- 
fortless and desolate, yet basking in the clear blaze 
of his Divinity, the Comforter falls on our souls like 
showers of morning light. If before we trusted to 
the barren technicologies of schools and sects, they 
now melt away like web-work before this bright 
coming of the Lord. If before we trusted to a 
righteousness imputed, we now rejoice in a right- 
eousness imparted every hour. If then we were 
only conscious of indwelling sin, we now become 
daily conscious of the indwelling Christ. If God 
before had been to us only as an " abstraction " and 
a " principle," whom prayer could not reach or bring- 
down from the yielding heavens, call loudly as we 
might, he is now brought near to us in a Mediator 
that ever floods his Church, his body of true be- 
lievers, with light and love. A new heaven has 
opened above us, whence falls the everlasting light, 
and whence comes the blessed ventilation of renew- 
ing gales. Thus we " receive the atonement." 

5. And yet all these heavenly frames of mind 
might pass away, and these tender communings 
might grow less and less and cease for ever, did they 
not prompt us to a new life of action, and give us 
new delight in doing the Divine will. But Christ 
thus received seeks a new incarnation in every deed 
we do. The holy affections wrought within become 
our permanent possessions, because they are embod- 
ied in the daily forth-goings of a Christian life, with 
all its radiating charities. And since he that doeth 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 



243 



the Divine will shall know of the doctrine, while 
every revelation prompts to deed, every deed be- 
comes in turn a revelation. So man becomes a new 
creation, ever rising towards perfection, beneath the 
hand of the Omnipotent Framer. " I saw a new 
heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and 
the first earth were passed away." 

Not always, not often indeed, does our warfare en- 
tirely cease, so that we feel that our day of proba- 
tion is over and our final heaven has begun. The 
old lusts and appetites, though they grow weaker 
and weaker, sometimes awake and renew the con- 
flict, after we thought our final victory had been 
won. Doubts will arise and becloud our faith, and 
the prospect that opened so fair upon us dissolves 
away. But he who lives the life we have described, 
ascends sometimes those sun-smit summits where 
the tempters never come, above all cares and trou- 
bles, above even the clouds and the thunders, where 
he catches the fore-gleams of the land of peace and 
has the earnest of its blissful rest. There are 
those who, while yet enrobed with mortality, have 
reached these golden heights never to descend from 
them, never more to be tempted by sin, never more 
to be perplexed with doubt, whose placid affections 
are never ruffled, but rise in perpetual prayer, and 
on whose ears the sounds from the world they have 
overcome rise like murmurs from a land afar. Such 
is entire regeneration. If we follow Christ in the 
regeneration, and are faithful unto the end, death 
may find us at that .peaceful summit of the western 
hills. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

VISTAS. 

" For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I -will bring silyer, and for wood brass, 
and for stones iron." — Isaiah lx. 17. 

We revert to the law of descent, so clearly and for- 
cibly unfolded by the Apostle, the law through whose 
operation come both the fall and the restoration of 
man. In running out the parallel between Adam 
and Christ, he makes the blessing commensurate with 
the bane. Through the first all die, for the foul tides 
of a perverted ancestral life flow on with ever-fresh 
accumulations of moral disease : through the last 
shall all be made alive, because the new life impart- 
ed by Jesus Christ is also transmissive, gathering 
power and intensity with every age, and becoming 
the richest inheritance of man. This is waxing 
while the other is waning. Hence a law of prog- 
ress made operative by Christianity, which in time 
is sure to renovate the world. While the work of 
individual regeneration is going on, the work of so- 
cial and humanitary regeneration is proceeding at 
the same time. Not solely, nor yet principally, by 
conversion and conquest, is Christ to take possession 
of his kingdom. He comes by a more internal way 



245 



By generic tendencies, that gather purity and vol- 
ume the farther they extend, the race is advancing, 
and a " golden progeny " daily descending from 
heaven. Hereditary evil is to grow less and less, 
while a pure hereditary life becomes more deep and 
strong. The regeneration of the individual is meas- 
ured in its successive stages by the months and 
years ; the regeneration of the race by cycles and 
centuries. From year to year we may not see the 
work of progress, but by comparing remote periods 
we see the melioration of its cruel customs, the 
gentle infusion of the spirit of mercy, and the ex- 
tension of the ties of brotherhood from class to class 
and from people to people, binding together anew a 
race that had existed so long as portions and frag- 
ments of an ancient ruin. 

Hence the first essential work of reform is in sep- 
arate individual minds. We may besiege our social 
evils from without with ever so much of noise and 
shouting, but since they are but our inward and 
perverted life, putting out into leaf and flower, we 
might tear away the leaves and flowers only to be 
produced again. Not that reform should not be 
preached, and Christianity faithfully applied to all 
outward abuses. But the prime duty of every man, 
not only to himself and God, but to his race, is self- 
purification, so that his nature shall be receptive 
of angelic affections and transmit them as the best 
inheritance to the coming time. He is no true re- 
former who does not study as in the fear of God 
the laws of his own existence, both psychological 



246 THE NEW MAN. 

and physical, and conform to them as laws that are 
sacred and Divine, deeming the transmission of evil 
tendencies as the foulest wrong which he can inflict 
upon his kind. They have done the most for the 
race whose inheritance to it is a pure and lofty man- 
hood, and from whom the sacred stream of being 
comes down unpolluted and strong. By such a 
" transmigration of souls " they become immortal 
on the earth, and they are abroad on errands of 
goodness while their bodies moulder in the cere- 
ments of the grave. 

There is a tradition of the Church founded on ob- 
scure prophecy, that Christ is to descend again upon 
the earth and reign a thousand years. Like the 
Jewish tradition of the Messiah, we think it has 
gathered around it human additions by coming 
through a corrupt past. He came to the Jews in a 
manner they had not conceived of, in their dreams 
of a temporal kingdom ; and so his coming again will 
doubtless transcend the highest thoughts of a sen- 
sual age. He comes not from without nor with ob- 
servation. He hath imported a new element into 
human history, which is to work there for ever and 
prevail at length over all other elements. Hidden 
deep beneath the world's tumult and confusion, it 
remains secure. Not alone by preachers and apos- 
tles and outward means is this new force to prevail. 
Mark the terms in the two branches of Paul's an- 
tithesis : " As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall 
all be made alive." As the Adam of history be- 
came the Adam of consciousness, and passed thence 



vistas 247 

into history again and took possession of the world, 
so the Christ of history becomes the Christ of con- 
sciousness, passing again into history till he lights 
up all its dark and bloody annals. He descends not 
through the cloven heavens, but through the human 
soul, in that divine life which grows more full and 
deep with every new generation, shaping to itself 
first man's inmost being, and thence flowering forth 
into the most external affairs, in works of justice 
and love, until the face of the earth wears again the 
bloom and the beauty of Eden. Old prophecy de- 
scribes the reign of Christ as the reign of peace. 
When he comes within us to disarm and expel our 
domestic foes, — they of our own spiritual household, 
— the conflict there is at an end, and the soul is " a 
dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and harmonies." 
When this work is everywhere accomplished, there 
will also be peace without ; for society is the mani- 
festation of man's inmost state, the radiation of his 
most secret life on the face of nature. So when 
that life is purified, it will fill the world with the 
trophies of peaceful industry, with the consenting 
voice of peoples and nations restored to one brother- 
hood, and with the hosannas of a redeemed humani- 
ty that strews the way of the Lord with palms. Not 
out of the skies, therefore, but out of the depths of 
human nature renewed and restored, does Christ 
come to establish his throne on the earth. When 
the law of descent is restored completely to its benef- 
icent operation, and when it shall send along the 
future only an enlarging inheritance of good, society 



248 THE NEW MAN. 

and the race, as well as the individual, will be re- 
generated, or, in Paul's language, " made alive in 
Christ"; and then the night of centuries brightens 
into the millennial day. 

Sublime, therefore, is the march of generations. 
The kingdom of Christ will not fail of its triumphs, 
since Christ not less then Adam has become im- 
manent in humanity. When weary of present evil 
and surrounding corruption, it is animating some- 
times to look away, and in the sure light of Chris- 
tian truth to watch the lengthening file of years that 
grow radiant as they run. 



THE END. 



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